Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

Although Jude had not slept well after Clem's visit (dreams of light bulbs, talking in a code of flickers she couldn't crack), she woke early and had laid her plans for the day by eight. She'd drive up to Highgate, she decided, and try and find some way into the prison beneath the tower, where the only woman left in the Fifth who might help empower her languished. She knew more about Celestine now than she had when she'd first visited the tower on New Year's Eve. Dowd had procured her for the Unbeheld, or so he claimed, plucking her from the streets of London and taking her to the borders of the First. That she'd survived such traumas at all was extraordinary. That she might be sane at the end of them, after divine violation and centuries of imprisonment, was almost certainly too much to hope for. But mad or not, Celestine was a much needed source of insight, and Jude was determined to dare whatever she had to in order to hear the woman speak.

The tower was so perfectly anonymous she drove past it before realizing that she'd done so.. Doubling back, she parked in a side street and approached on foot. There were no vehicles in the forecourt and no sign of life at any of the windows, but she marched to the front door and rang the bell, hoping there might be a caretaker she could persuade to let her in. She'd use Oscar's name as a reference, she decided. Though she knew this was playing with fire, there was no time for niceties. Whether Gentle's ambitions as a Reconciler were realized or not, the days ahead would be charged with possibilities. Things sealed were cracking; things silent were drawing breath to speak.

The door remained closed, though she rang and rapped several times. Frustrated, she headed around the back of the building, the route more choked by barbs and stings than ever. The tower's shadow chilled the ground where Clara had dropped and died, and the earth, which was badly drained, smelled of stagnancy. Until she walked here the thought of finding any fragments of the blue eye had not occurred to her, but perhaps it had been part of her unconscious agenda from the start. Finding no hope of access on this side of the building, she turned her attention to seeking the pieces. Though her recollections of what had happened here were strong, she couldn't pinpoint with any accuracy the place where Dowd's mites had devoured the stone, and she wandered around for fully an hour, searching through the long grass for some sign. Her patience was finally rewarded, however. Much farther from the tower than she'd ever have guessed, she found what the devourers had left. It was little more than a pebble, which anybody but herself would have passed over. But to her eyes its blue was unmistakable, and when she knelt to pick it up she was almost reverential. It looked like an egg, she thought, lying there in a nest of grass, waiting for the warmth of a body to kindle the life in it.

As she stood up she heard the sound of car doors slamming on the other side of the building. Keeping the stone in her hand she slipped back down the side of the tower. There were voices in the forecourt: men and women exchanging words of welcome. At the corner, she had a glimpse of them. Here they were, the Tabula Rasa. In her imagination she'd elevated them to the dubious status of Grand Inquisitors, austere and merciless judges whose cruelty would be gouged into their faces. There was perhaps one among this quartet—the eldest of the three men—who would not have looked absurd in robes, but the others had an insipidity about their features and a sloth in their bearing that would have made them bathetic in any garb but the most bland. None looked particularly happy with his lot. To judge by their leaden eyes, sleep had failed to befriend them lately. Nor could their expensive clothes (everything charcoal and black) conceal the lethargy in their limbs.

She waited at the corner until they'd disappeared through the front door, hoping the last had left it ajar. But it was once again locked, and this time she declined to knock. While she might have brazened or flattered her way past a caretaker, none of the quartet she'd seen would have spared her an inch. As she stepped away from the door another car turned off the road and glided into the forecourt. Its driver was a male, and the youngest of the arrivees. It was too late to dodge for cover, so she raised her hand in a cheery way and picked up her pace to a smart trot.

As she came abreast of the vehicle it halted. She kept on walking. Once past it, she heard the car door open and a fruity, overeducated voice said, "You there! What are you doing?"

She kept up her trot, resisting the temptation to run even though she heard his feet on the gravel, then another haughty holler as he came in pursuit. She ignored him until she was at the property line and he was within grasping distance of her. Then she turned, with a pretty smile, and said, "Did you call?"

"This is a private ground," he replied.

"I'm sorry, I must have the wrong address. You're not a gynecologist, are you?" Where this invention sprang from she didn't know, but it colored his cheeks in two pulses. "I need to see a doctor as soon as possible."

He shook his head, covered in confusion. "This isn't the hospital," he spluttered. "It's halfway down the hill."

Lord bless the English male, she thought, who could be reduced to near idiocy at the very mention of matters vaginal.

"Are you sure you're not a doctor?" she said, enjoying his discomfiture. "Even a student? I don't mind."

He actually took a step back from her at this, as though she was going to pounce on him and demand an examination on the spot.

"No, I'm—I'm sorry."

"So am I," she said, extending her hand. He was too baffled to refuse, and shook it. "I'm Sister Concupiscentia," she said.

"Bloxham," he replied.

"You should be a gynecologist," she said appreciatively. "You've got lovely warm hands." And with that she left him to his blushes.

There was a message from Chester Klein on the answering machine when she got back, inviting her to a cocktail party at his house that evening, in celebration of what he called the Bastard Boy's return to the land of the living. She was at first startled that Gentle had decided to make contact with his friends after all his talk of invisibility, then flattered that he'd taken her advice. Perhaps she'd been over-hasty in her rejection of him. Even in the short time she'd spent in Yzordderrex, the city had made her think and behave in ways she'd never have countenanced in the Fifth. How much more so for Gentle, whose catalogue of adventures in the Dominions would have filled a dozen diaries. Now he was back in the Fifth, perhaps he was resisting some of those bizarrer influences, like a man returned to civilization from some lost tribe, sluicing off the war paint and learning to wear shoes again. She called Klein back and accepted the invitation.

"My dear child, you are a sight for sore eyes," he said when she appeared on his doorstep that evening. "So stylishly unnourished! Malnutrition a la mode. Perfection."

She hadn't seen him in a long time, but she didn't remember his ever being so fulsome in his flattery before. He kissed her on both cheeks and led her through the house into the back garden. There was still warmth in the descending sun, and his other guests—two of whom she knew, two of whom were strangers—were sipping cocktails on the lawn. Though small and high-walled, the garden was almost tropically lush. Inevitably, given Klein's nature, it was entirely given over to flowering species, no bush or plant welcomed if it didn't bloom with immoderate abandon. He introduced her to the company one by one, starting with Vanessa, whose face—though much changed since they'd last met—was one of the two she knew. She had put on a good deal of weight and even more makeup, as though to cover one excess with another. Her eyes, Jude saw when she said hello, were those of a woman who was only holding back a scream for decorum's sake.