Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

Picking up her pace, Jude overtook Monday and headed around the Retreat—the walls of which were black with insects—to the door. At the threshold, she halted. There was a small fire burning inside, built close to the edge of the mosaic.

"Some bugger got here first," Monday remarked.

"I don't see anyone."

He pointed to a bundle lying on the floor beyond the fire. His eyes, more accustomed than hers to seeing life in rags, had found the fire maker. She stepped into the Retreat, knowing before he raised his head who this creature was. How could she not? Three times before—once here, once in Yzordderrex, and once, most recently, in the Tabula Rasa's tower—this man had made an unexpected arrival, as though to prove what he'd claimed not so long ago: that their lives would be perpetually interwoven, because they were the same.

"Dowd?"

He didn't move.

"Knife," she said to Monday.

He passed it over and, armed, she advanced across the Retreat towards the bundle. Dowd's hands were crossed on his chest, as though he expected to expire where he lay. His eyes were closed, but they were the only part of his face that was. Almost every other inch had been laid open by Celestine's assault, and despite his legendary powers of recuperation he'd been unable to make good the damage done. He was unmasked to the bone. Yet he breathed, albeit weakly, and moaned to himself now and then, as though dreaming of punishment or revenge. She was half tempted to kill him in his sleep and have this bitter business brought to an end on the spot. But she was curious to know why he was here. Had he attempted to return to Yzordderrex, and failed, or was he expecting someone to come back this way and meet him here? Either could be significant in these volatile times, and though in her present venomous state she felt perfectly capable of dispatching him, he'd always been an agent in the dealings of greater souls and might still have some fragment of use as a messenger. She went down on her haunches beside him and spoke his name above the din of birds coming back to roost on the roof. He opened his eyes only slowly, adding their glisten to the wetness of his features.

"Look at you," he said. "You're radiant, lovey." It was a line from a boulevard comedy, and despite his wretched condition he spoke it with elan. "I, of course, look like ordure. Will you come closer to me? I don't have the energy for volume."

She hesitated to comply. Though he was on the verge of extinction, he had boundless capacity for malice in him and, with the Pivot's sloughings still fixed in his flesh, the power to do harm.

"I can hear you perfectly well where I am," she said.

"I'm good for a hundred words at this volume," he bargained. "Twice that at a whisper."

"What have we got left to say to each other?"

"Ah," he said. "So much. You think you've heard everybody's stories, don't you? Mine. Sartori's. Godolphin's. Even the Reconciler's, by now. But you're missing one."

"Oh, am I?" she said, not much caring. "Whose is that?"

"Come closer."

"I'll hear it from here or not at all."

He looked at her beadily. "You're a bitch, you really are."

"And you're wasting words. If you've got something to say, say it. Whose story am I missing?"

He bided his time before replying, to squeeze what little drama he could out of this. Finally, he said, "The Father's."

"What father?"

"Is there more than one? Hapexamendios. The Aboriginal. The Unbeheld. He of the First Dominion."

"You don't know that story," she said.

He reached up with sudden speed, and his hand was clamped around her arm before she could move out of range. Monday saw the attack and came running, but she halted him before he plowed into Dowd and sent him back to sit by the fire.

"It's all right," she told him. "He's not going to hurt me. Are you?" She studied Dowd. "Well, are you?" she said again. "You can't afford to lose me. I'm the last audience you'll have, and you know it. If you don't tell this story to me, you're not going to tell it to anybody. Not this side of Hell."

The man quietly conceded her point. "True," he said.

"So tell. Unburden yourself."

He drew a laborious breath; then he began.

"I saw Him once, you know," he said. "The Father of the Imajica. He came to me in the desert."

"He appeared in person, did He?" she said, her skepticism plain.

"Not exactly. I heard Him speaking out of the First. But I saw hints, you know, in the Erasure."

"And what did He look like?"

"Like a man, from what I could see."

"Or what you imagined."

"Maybe I did," Dowd said. "But I didn't imagine what He told me—"

"That He'd raise you up. Make you His procurer. You've told me all this before, Dowd."

"Not all of it," he said. "When I'd seen Him, I came back to the Fifth, using feits He'd whispered to me to cross the In Ovo, and I searched the length and breadth of London for a woman to be blessed among women."

"And you found Celestine?"

"Yes. I found Celestine—at Tyburn, as a matter of fact— watching a hanging. I don't know why I chose her. Perhaps because she laughed so hard when the man kissed the noose, and I thought, She's no sentimentalist, this woman; she won't weep and wail if she's taken into another Dominion. She wasn't beautiful, even then, but she had a clarity, you know? Some actresses have it. The great ones, anyway. A face that could carry extremes of emotion and not look bathetic. Maybe I was a little infatuated with her...." He shivered. "I was capable of that when I was younger. So ... I made myself known to her, and told her I wanted to show her a living dream, the like of which she'd never forget. She resisted at first, but I could have talked the face off the moon in those days, and she let me drug her with sways and take her away. It was a hell of a journey. Four months, across the Dominions. But I got her there eventually, back to the Erasure...."

"And what happened?"

"It opened."

"And?"

"I saw the City of God."

Here at least was something she wanted to know about. "What was it like?" she said.

"It was just a glimpse—"

Having denied him her proximity for so long, she leaned towards him and repeated her question inches from his ravaged face. "What was it like?"

"Vast and gleaming and exquisite."

"Gold?"

"All colors. But it was just a glimpse. Then the walls seemed to burst, and something reached for Celestine and took her."

"Did you see what it was?"

"I've tried to remember, over and over. Sometimes I think it was like a net; sometimes like a cloud. Idon't know. Whatever it was, it took her."

"You tried to help her, of course," Jude said.

"No, I shat my pants and crawled away. What could I do? She belonged to God. And in the long run, wasn't she the lucky one?"

"Abducted and raped?"

"Abducted, raped, and made a little divine. Whereas I, who'd done all the work, what was I?"

"A pimp."

"Yes. A pimp. Anyway, she's had her revenge," he said sourly. "Look at me! She's had more than enough."

That was true. The life both Oscar and Quaisoir had failed to extinguish in Dowd, Celestine had virtually put out.

"So that's the Father's tale?" Jude said. "I've heard most of it before."

"That's the tale. But what's the moral?"

"You tell me."

He shook his head slightly. "I don't know whether you're mocking or not"

"I'm listening, aren't I? Be grateful for small mercies. You could be lying here without an audience."

"Well, that's part of it, isn't it? I'm not. You could have come here when I was dead. You could maybe not have come here at all. But our lives have collided one last time. That's fate's way of telling me to unburden myself."

"Of what?"

"I'll tell you." Again, a labored breath. "All these years I've wondered: Why did God pluck a scabby little actor chappie up out of the dirt and send him across three Dominions to fetch Him a woman?"