Clive Barker - Imajica 01 - The Fifth Dominion

way.

Despite the dire warnings issued by Oscar it was difficult to find much intimidating about the place, with the spring sunshine warm enough to make her slip off her jacket, and the grass busy with sparrows quarreling over worms raised by the rain. She scanned the windows, looking for some sign of occupation, but saw none. Avoiding the front door, with its camera trained on the step, she headed down the side of the building, her progress unimpeded by walls or barbed wire. The owners had clearly decided the tower's best defense lay in its utter lack of character, and the less they did to keep trespassers out the fewer would be attracted in the first place. There was even less to see from the back than the front. There were blinds down over most of the windows, and those few that were not covered let onto empty rooms. She made a complete circuit of the tower, looking for some other way into it, but there was none.

As she returned to the front of the building she tried to imagine the passageways buried beneath her feet—the books piled in the darkness, and the imprisoned soul lying in a deeper darkness still—hoping her mind might be able to go where her body could not. But that exercise proved as fruitless as her window-watching. The real world was implacable; it wouldn't shift a particle of soil to let her through. Discouraged, she made one final circuit of the tower, then decided to give up. Maybe she'd come back here at night, she thought, when solid reality didn't insist on her senses so brutally. Or maybe seek another journey under the influence of the blue eye, though this option made her nervous. She had no real grasp of the mechanism by which the eye induced such flights, and she feared giving it power over her. Oscar already had enough of that.

She put her jacket back on and headed away from the tower. To judge by the absence of traffic on Hornsey Lane, the hill—which had been clogged with traffic—was still blocked, preventing drivers from making their way in this direction. The gulf usually filled with the din of vehicles was not empty, however. There were footsteps close behind her; and a voice.

"Who are you?"

She glanced around, not assuming the question was directed at her, but finding that she and the questioner—a woman in her sixties, shabbily dressed and sickly—were the only people in sight. Moreover, the woman's stare was fixed upon her with a near manic intensity. Again, the question, coming from a mouth that had about it a spittle-flecked asymmetry that suggested the speaker had suffered a stroke in the past.

"Who are you?"

Already irritated by her failure at the tower, Judith was in no mood to humor what was plainly the local schizophrenic and was turning on her heel to walk away when the woman spoke again. "Don't you know they'll hurt you?" "Who will?1'she said.

"The people in the tower. The Tabula Rasa. What were you looking for?" "Nothing."

"You were looking very hard for nothing."

"Are you spying for them?"

The woman made an ugly sound that Judith took to be a laugh. "They don't even know I'm alive," she said. Then, for the third time, "Who are you?" "My name's Judith."

"I'm Clara Leash," the woman said. She cast a glance back in the direction of the tower. "Walk on," she said. "There's a church halfway up the hill. I'll meet you there." "What is all this about?" "At the church, not here."

So saying, she turned her back on Judith and walked off, her agitation enough to dissuade Judith from following. Two words in their short exchange convinced her she should wait at the church and find out what Clara Leash had to say, however. Those words were Tabula Rasa. She hadn't heard them spoken since her conversation with Charlie at the estate, when he'd told her how he'd been passed over for membership in favor of Oscar. He'd made light of it at the time, and much of what he'd said had been blotted from her mind by the violence and the revelations that followed. Now she found herself digging for recollections of what he'd said about the organization. Something about the tainted soil of England, and her saying tainted by what?, and Charlie making some comical reply. Now she knew what that taint was: magic. In that bland tower the lives of the men and women whose bodies had been found in shallow graves or scraped from the rails of the Piccadilly Line had been judged and found corrupt. No wonder Oscar was losing weight and sobbing in his sleep. He was a member of a Society formed for the express purpose of eradicating a second, and diminishing, society, to which he also belonged. For all his self-possession he was the servant at two masters: magic and its despoiler. It fell to her to help him by whatever means she could. She was his lover, an without her aid he would eventually be crushed between contrary imperatives. And he in his turn was her ticket to Yzordderrex, without whom she would never see the glories of the Imajica. They needed each other, alive and sane.

She waited at the church for half an hour before Clara Leash appeared, looking fretful.

"Out here's no good," she said. "Inside."

They stepped into the gloomy building and sat close to the altar so as not to be overheard by the three noontime, supplicants who were at their prayers towards the back. It was not an ideal place in which to have a whispered conversation; their sibilance carried even if the sense did not, its echoes corning back to meet them off the bare walls. Nor was there much trust between them to begin with. To defend herself from Clara's glare, Judith spent the early part of their exchange with her back half turned to the woman,; only facing her fully when they'd disposed of the circumlfr-cutions and she felt confident enough to ask the question most on her mind.

"What do you know about the Tabula Rasa?"

"Everything there is to know," Clara replied. "I was a

member of the Society for many years."

"But they think you're dead?"

"They're not far wrong. I haven't got more than a few months left, which is why it's important I pass along what I know."

"To me?"

"That depends," she said. "First I want to know what you were doing at the tower." "I was looking for a way in." "Have you ever been inside?" "Yes and no."

"Meaning what?"

"My mind's been inside even though my body hasn't," Judith said, fully expecting a repeat of Clara's weird little laugh in response.

Instead, the woman said, "On the night of December the thirty-first."

"How the hell did you know that?"

Clara put her hand up to Judith's face. Her fingers were icy cold. "First, you should know how I departed the Tabula Rasa."

Though she told her story without embellishments, it took some time, given that so much of what she was explaining required footnotes for Judith to fully comprehend its significance. Clara, like Oscar, was the descendant of one of the Society's founding members and had been brought up to believe in its basic principles: England, tainted by magic—indeed, almost destroyed by it—had to be protected from any cult or individual who sought to educate new generations in its corrupt practices. When Judith asked how this near destruction had come about, Clara's answer was a story in itself. Two hundred years ago this coming midsummer, she explained, a ritual had been attempted that had gone tragically awry. Its purpose had been to reconcile the reality of earth with those of four other dimensions.

"The Dominions," Judith said, dropping her voice, which was already low, lower still.

"Say it out loud," Clara replied. "Dominions! Dominions!" She only raised her voice to speaking volume, but after such a time whispering it was shockingly loud. "It's been a secret for too long," she said. "And that gives the enemy power."

"Who is the enemy?"

"There are so many," she said. "In this Dominion, the Tabula Rasa and its servants. And it's got plenty of thos -believe me, in the very highest places."