Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

A dreadlocked black squatted on the low wall beside the garden's gate and, spotting Clem, rose to guard the entrance. Clem didn't retreat. There was no threat visible in the man's posture, nor anything but calm in the garden beyond. The sleepers did so quietly, their dreams seemingly kind. And the debaters around the fire spoke in whispers. When they laughed, which they did now and then, it wasn't the hard, desperate noise he'd heard among these clans, but light.

"Who are you, man?" the black asked him.

"My name's Clem. I got lost."

"You don't look like you been sleepin' rough, man."

"I haven't."

"So why you here?"

"Like I said: I got lost."

The man shrugged. "Waterloo Station's over in that direction," he said, pointing roughly back the way Clem had come. "But you got a long wait for the first train." He caught Clem's glance into the garden. "Sorry, man, you can't come in. If you got a bed, go to it."

Clem didn't move, however. Something about one of the men at the fire, standing with his back to the gate, rooted him to the spot.

"Who is that, who's talking now?" he asked the guard.

The man glanced around. "That's the Gentile," he said.

"The Gentile?" he said. "Surely you mean Gentle."

He hadn't raised his voice in order to name the man, but the syllables must have carried on the tranquil air, because as they went from Clem's lips the speaker stopped talking and slowly turned towards the gate. With the fire burning at his back his features were hard to make out, but Clem knew he'd made no error. The man turned back to his fellow debaters and said something to them Clem didn't catch. Then he left their fire and walked down to the gate.

"Gentle?" his visitor said. "It's Clem."

The black stood aside, opening the gate to let the man he'd called the Gentile step out of the garden. There he stood and studied the stranger.

"Do I know you?" he said. There was no enmity in his voice, but there was no warmth either. "I do, don't I?"

"Yes, you do, my friend," Clem replied. "Yes, you do."

They walked together along the river, leaving the sleepers and the fire behind them. The many changes in Gentle soon became apparent. He was of course far from certain of who he was, but there were other changes which were, Clem sensed, profounder still. There was a plainness about his speech, and about the expression on his face, which was by turns disturbing and calming. Something of the Gentle he and Taylor had known had gone, perhaps forever. But something was on its way to being gained in its place, and Clem wanted to be there when it was: to be the angel guarding that tender self.

"Did you paint the pictures?" he asked.

"With my friend Monday," Gentle said. "We made them together."

"I never saw you paint anything like that before."

"They're places I've been," Gentle told him, "and people I've known. They start coming back to me when I've got the colors. But it's slow. There's so much filling my head"— he put his fingers to his brow, which bore a series of ill-healed lacerations—"confusing me. You call me Gentle, but I've got other names."

"John Zacharias?"

"That's one. Then there's a man in me called Joseph Bellamy, and another called Michael Morrison, and one called Almoth, and one called Fitzgerald, and one called Sartori. They all seem to be me, Clem. But that's not possible, is it? I asked Monday, and Carol, and Irish, and they said people have two names, sometimes three, but never ten."

"Maybe you've lived other lives, Gentle, and you're remembering them."

"If that's true, I don't want to remember. It hurts too much. I can't think straight. I want to be one man with one life. I want to know where I begin and where I end, instead of going on and on."

"Why's that so terrible?" Clem said, genuinely unable to see the horror in such expansion.

"Because I'm afraid there'll be no end to it," Gentle replied. He spoke steadily, like a metaphysician who'd reached a precipice and was calmly describing the abyss below for the benefit of those who couldn't—or wouldn't— be with him there. "I'm afraid I'm joined "to everything else," he said. "And then I'm going to be lost. I want to be this man, or that man, but not every man. If I'm everyone I'm no one, and nothing."

He stopped his even stride and turned to Clem, putting his hands on Clem's shoulders.

"Who am I?" he said. "Just tell me. If you love me, tell me. Who am I?" "You're my friend."

It wasn't an eloquent reply, but it was the only one Clem had. Gentle studied his companion's face for a minute or more, as if calculating the potency of this axiom against his dread. And slowly, as he scanned Clem's features, a smile plucked at the corners of his mouth, and tears began to glisten hi his eyes.

"You see me, don't you?" he said softly. "Of course I see you."

"I don't mean with your sight, I mean with your mind. I exist in your head."

"Gear as crystal," Clem said.

That was truer now than it had ever been. Gentle nodded, and his smile spread.

"Somebody else tried to teach me this," he said. "But I didn't understand." He paused, musing. Then he said, "It doesn't matter what I'm called. Names are nothing. I am what I am in you." His arms slipped around Clem, into an embrace. "I'm your friend."

He hugged Clem hard, then stood away, the tears clearing.

"Who was it who taught me that?" he wondered. "Judith, maybe?"

He shook his head. "I see her face over and over," he said. "But it wasn't her. It was somebody who went away." "Was it Taylor?" Clem said. "Do you remember Taylor?"

"He knew me too?" "He loved you."

"Where is he now?"

"That's a whole other story."

"Is it?" Gentle replied. "Or is it all one?"

They walked on along the river, exchanging questions and answers as they went. At Gentle's request Clem recounted Taylor's story, from life to deathbed, from deathbed to light, and Gentle in his turn offered what clues he had to the nature of the journey he'd returned from. Though he could remember very few of the details, he knew that unlike Taylor's it had not taken him into brightness. He'd lost many friends along the way—their names mingled with those of the lives he'd lived—and seen the deaths of many others. But he'd also witnessed the wonders he'd painted on the walls. Sunless skies that shimmered green and gold; a palace of mirrors, like Versailles; vast, mysterious deserts and ice cathedrals full of bells. Listening to these traveler's tales, the vistas of hitherto unknown worlds spreading in all directions, Clem felt his earlier ease with the notion of an unbounded self, going into some limitless adventure, falter. The very divisions he'd happily tried to persuade Gentle from at the outset of this report looked tempting now. But they were a trap, and he knew it. Their comfort would smother and hobble him eventually. He had to unburden himself of his old, stale ways of thinking if he was to travel alongside this man into places where dead souls were light and being was a function of thought.

"Why did you come back?" he asked Gentle after a time.

"I wish I knew," Gentle replied.

"We should find Judith. I think maybe she knows more about this than either of us."

"I don't want to leave these people, Clem. They took me in."

"I understand that," Clem said. "But Gentle, they can't help you now. They don't understand what's going on."

"Nor do we," Gentle reminded him. "But they listened when I told my story. They watched me paint, and they asked me questions, and when I told them the visions I'd had they didn't mock me." He stopped and pointed over the river towards the Houses of Parliament. "The lawgivers'll be coming there soon," he said. "Would you trust what I just told you to them? If we said to them that the dead come back in sunlight and there are worlds where the sky's green and gold, what would they say?" "They'd say we were crazy."