Clive Barker - Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion

"Don't be nervous," Charlie said, beckoning her in.

He spoke too loudly for the place; his voice carried around the vast bare circle and came back to meet him magnified. He seemed not to notice. Perhaps it was simply familiarity that bred this indifference, but she thought not. For all his talk of embracing the miraculous, Charlie was still a pragmatist, fixed in the particular. Whatever forces moved here, and she felt them strongly, he was dead to their presence.

Approaching the Retreat she'd thought the place win-dowless, but she'd been wrong. At the intersection of wall and dome ran a ring of windows, like a halo fitted to the chapel's skull. Small though they were, they let in sufficient light to strike the floor and rise up into the middle of the space, where the luminescence converged above the mosaic. If this was indeed a place of departure, that rarefied spot was the platform.

"It's nothing special, is it?" Charlie observed.

She was about to disagree, searching for a way to express what she was feeling, when Skin began barking outside. This wasn't the excited yapping with which he'd announced each new pissing place along the way, but a sound of alarm. She started towards the door, but the hold the chapel had on her slowed her response, and Charlie was out before she'd reached the step, calling to the dog to be quiet. He stopped barking suddenly.

"Charlie?" she said.

There was no reply. With the dog quieted she heard a greater quiet. The birds had stopped singing.

Again she said, "Charlie?" and as she did so somebody stepped into the doorway. It was not Charlie; this man, bearded and heavy, was a stranger. But her system responded to the sight of him with a shock of recognition, as though he was some long lost comrade. She might have thought herself crazy, except that what she felt was echoed on his face. He looked at her with narrowed eyes, turning his head a little to the side.

"You're Judith?"

"Yes. Who are you?"

"Oscar Godolphin."

She let her shallow breaths go, in favor of a deeper draft.

"Oh... thank God,'1 she said. "You startled me. I thought... I don't know what I thought. Did the dog try and attack you?"

"Forget the dog," he said, stepping into the chapel. "Have we met before?"

"I don't believe so," she said. "Where's Charlie? Is he all right?"

Godolphin continued to approach her, his step steady. "This confuses things," he said.

"What does?"

"Me... knowing you. You being whoever you are. It confuses things."

"I don't see why," she said. "I'd wanted to meet you, and I asked Charlie several times if he'd introduce us, but he always seemed reluctant... ." She kept chattering, as much to defend herself from his appraisal as for communication's sake. She felt if she fell silent she'd forget herself utterly, become his object. "I'm very pleased we finally get to talk."

He was close enough to touch her now. She put out her hand to shake his.

"It really is a pleasure," she said.

Outside, the dog began barking again, and this time its din was followed by a shout.

"Oh, God, he's bitten somebody," Jude said, and started towards the door.

Oscar took hold of her arm, and the contact, light but proprietorial, checked her. She looked back towards him, and all the laughable cliches of romantic fiction were suddenly real and deadly serious. Her heart was beating in her throat; her cheeks were beacons; the ground seemed uncertain beneath her feet. There was no pleasure in this, only a sickening powerlessness she could do nothing to defend herself against. Her only comfort—and it was small—was the fact that her partner in this dance of desire seemed almost as distressed by their mutual fixation as she.

The dog's din was abruptly cut short, and she heard Charlie yell her name. Oscar's glance went to the door, and hers went with it, to see Estabrook, armed with a cudgel of wood, gasping at the threshold. Behind him, an abomination: a half-burned creature, its face caved in (Charlie's doing, she saw; there were scraps of its blackened flesh on the cudgel) reaching blindly for him.

She cried out at the sight, and he stepped aside as it lurched forward. It lost its balance on the step and fell. One hand, fingers burned to the bone, reached for the door-jamb, but Charlie brought his weapon down on its wounded head. Skull shards flew; silvery blood preceded its head to the step, as its hand missed its purchase and it collapsed on the threshold.

She heard Oscar quietly moan.

"You fuckhead!" Charlie said.

He was panting and sweaty, but there was a gleam of purpose in his eye she'd never seen the like of.

"Let her go," he said.

She felt Oscar's grip go from her arm and mourned its departure. What she'd felt for Charlie had been only a prophecy of what she felt now; as if she'd loved him in remembrance of a man she'd never met. And now that she had, now that she'd heard the true voice and not its echo, Estabrook seemed like a poor substitute, for all his tardy heroism.

Where these feelings came from she didn't know, but they had the force of instinct, and she would not be gainsaid. She stared at Oscar. He was overweight, overdressed, and doubtless overbearing: not the kind of individual she'd have sought out, given the choice. But for some reason she didn't yet comprehend, she'd had that choice denied. Some urge profounder than conscious desire had claimed her will. The fears she had for Charlie's safety, and indeed for her own, were suddenly remote: almost abstractions.

"Take no notice of him," Charlie said. "He's not going to hurt you."

She glanced his way. He looked like a husk beside his brother, beset by tics and tremors. How had she ever loved him?

"Come here," he said, beckoning to her.

She didn't move, until Oscar said, "Go on."

More out of obedience to his instruction than any wish to go, she started to walk towards Charlie.

As she did so another shadow fell across the threshold. A severely dressed young man with dyed blond hair appeared at the door, the lines of his face perfect to the point of banality.

"Stay away, Dowd," Oscar said. "This is just Charlie and me."

Dowd looked down at the body on the step, then back at Oscar, offering two words of warning: "He's dangerous."

"I know what he is," Oscar said. "Judith, why don't you step outside with Dowd?"

"Don't go near that little fucker," Charlie told her. "He killed Skin. And there's another of those things out there."

"They're called voiders, Charles," Oscar said. "And they're not going to harm a hair on her beautiful head. Judith. Look at me." She looked around at him. "You're not in danger. You understand? Nobody's going to hurt you."

She understood and believed him. Without looking back at Charlie, she went to the door. The dog killer moved aside, offering her a hand to help her over the voider's corpse, but she ignored it and went out into the sun with a shameful lightness in her heart and step. Dowd followed her as she walked from the chapel. She felt his stare.

"Judith..." he said, as if astonished.

"That's me," she replied, knowing that to lay claim to that identity was somehow momentous.

Squatting in the humus a little way from them she saw the other voider. It was idly perusing the body of Skin, running its fingers over the dog's flank. She looked away, unwilling to have the strange joy she felt soured by morbidity.

She and Dowd had reached the edge of the wood, where she had an unhindered view of the sky. The sun was sinking, gaining color as it fell and lending a new glamour to the vista of park, terraces, and house.

"I feel as though I've been here before," she said.

The thought was strangely soothing. Like the feelings she had towards Oscar, it rose from some place in her she didn't remember owning, and identifying its source was not for now as important as accepting its presence. That she did, gladly. She'd spent so much of her recent life in the grip of events that lay outside her power to control, it was a pleasure to touch a source of feeling that was so deep, so instinctive, she didn't need to analyze its intentions. It was part of her, and therefore good. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after, she'd question its significance more closely.