Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"Get it off me!" he said to the Jaff. "Get it the fuck off me!"

Tommy-Ray applauded the sight of Howie, spinning around like a dog with a flea on its tail.

"Go, man, go!" he whooped.

"I wouldn't try that if I were you," the Jaff said.

Before Howie could wonder why, he got his answer. The creature bit down hard on his neck. He yelled out, falling to his knees. The expression of pain brought a chorus of clicks and mutters from the roof and kitchen wall. Agonized, Howie turned back towards the Jaff. The patrician had let his face slip; the fetus-headed thing behind was vast and gleaming. He had only an instant to glimpse it before the sound of Jo-Beth's sobs took his gaze to the trees, where she was in Tommy-Ray's grip. That glimpse too (her wet eyes, her open mouth) was horribly brief. Then the ache at his neck made him close his eyes, and when he opened them again she, and Tommy, and their unborn father were gone.

He got to his feet. There was a wave of motion going through the Jaff's army. Those lowest on the wall were dropping to the ground, followed by those higher up, the process ascending at such a rate the battalions were soon three or four deep on the lawn. Some struggled free of the crush and began towards Howie by whatever means of propulsion they possessed. The larger creatures were skipping down the roof to join the pursuit. With what little lead the Jaff had offered eroded with every second he delayed, Howie ran pell-mell for the open street.

Fletcher felt the boy's terror and revulsion all too clearly, but he labored to put it from his mind. Howie had rejected his father to go in search of the Jaff's wretched offspring, blinded no doubt by mere appearance. If he was suffering the consequence of such willfulness then that was his burden, and let him carry it alone. If he survived, perhaps he'd be the wiser. If not, then his life, whose purpose he'd flown in the face of the moment he'd turned his back on his creator, would end in as wretched a fashion as Fletcher's, and there'd be justice in that.

Hard thoughts, but Fletcher did his best to keep them in focus, summoning up the image of his son's reflection every time he felt the boy's pain. It was not enough, however. Try as he might to expunge Howie's terrors, they demanded a hearing, and he had no choice, at the last, but to let them in. In a sense they completed this night of despair, and had to be embraced. He and his child were interlocking pieces in a pattern of defeat and failure.

He called to the boy:

Howardhowardhowardhow— the same call he'd put out after first rising from the rock.

Howardhowardhowardhow—

He sent the message out rhythmically, like a cliff-top beacon. Hoping that his son was not too weak to hear, he turned his attention back to the end-game. With the Jaff's victory looming, he had one final gambit available to him, a hand he didn't want to tempt himself with, knowing how strong his desire for transformation was. It had been a torment to him all these years, being morally bound to stay on this level of being in the hope of defeating the evil he'd helped create, when an hour didn't pass without his thoughts turning to escape. He wanted so much to be free of this world and its nonsenses; to unhitch himself from this anatomy and aspire, as Schiller had said of all art, to the condition of music. Could it be that the time was now ripe to give in to that instinct, and in the last moments of his life as Fletcher hope to snatch a fragment of victory from near inevitable defeat? If so, he had to plan well, both the method of self-dispatch and its arena. There could be no repeat performance for the tribe who occupied Palomo Grove. If he, their rejected shaman, died unnoticed then more than a few hundred souls would be forfeit.

He had tried not to think too hard of the consequences of the Jaff's triumph, knowing that the sense of responsibility might well overwhelm him. But now, as the final confrontation approached, he'd bullied himself into facing it. If the Jaff secured the Art, and through it gained free access to Quiddity, what would it mean?

For one, a being not purified by the rigors of self-denial would have power over a place kept from all but the purged and the perfect. Fletcher did not entirely understand what Quiddity was (perhaps no human could), but he was certain the }aff, who'd used the Nuncio to cheat his way out of his limitations, would wreak havoc there. The dream-sea and its island (islands perhaps; he'd heard Jaff once say there were archipelagos) were visited by humanity at three vital times, in innocence, extremis, and love. On the shores of Ephemeris they mingled briefly with absolutes; saw sights and heard stories that would keep them from insanity in the face of being alive. There, briefly, was pattern and purpose; there was a glimpse of continuity; there was the Show, the Great and Secret Show, which rhyme and ritual were created to be keepsakes of. If that island were to become the Jaff's playground, the damage would be incalculable. What was secret would become commonplace; what was holy, desanctified; and a species kept from lunacy by its dream journeys there would be left unhealed.

There was another fear in Fletcher, less easily thought through because less coherent. It centered on the tale the Jaff had first presented him with, when he'd appeared in Washington with his offer of funds to pursue the riddle of the Nuncio. There had been, he'd said, a man called Kissoon: a shaman who'd known about the Art and its powers, whom the Jaff had finally found in a place that he'd claimed was a loop of time. Fletcher had listened to the account not really believing much of it, but subsequent events had spiralled to such fantastical heights the idea of Kissoon's Loop seemed small beer now. What part the shaman, with his attempt to have the Jaff murder him, played in the grand scheme, Fletcher couldn't know, but his instinct told him it was by no means finished with. Kissoon had been the last surviving member of the Shoal; an order of elevated human beings who had guarded the Art from the likes of the Jaff since Homo sapiens began to dream. Why then had he allowed a man like Jaff, who must have stunk of ambition from the outset, access to his Loop? Why indeed had he been in hiding there at all? And what had happened to the other members of the Shoal?

It was too late now to pursue answers to these questions; but he wanted to put them into somebody else's head besides his own. He would make one last attempt to bridge the gap between himself and his own. If Howard were not the recipient of these observations then they'd go to nothing when he, Fletcher, made his exit.

Which brought him back to the grim business ahead; its method and its setting. It had to be a piece of theater; a spectacular last act that would coax the people of Palomo Grove away from their television screens and into the streets, wide-eyed. After some weighing up of alternatives he chose one, and, still calling his son to him, started towards the site of his final liberation.

Howie had heard Fletcher's call as he fled before the Jaff's army, but the waves of panic that kept breaking over him kept him from fixing their place of origin. He ran blindly, the terata on his heels. It was only when he felt he'd gained sufficient lead to take a breath that his confounded senses heard his name called clearly enough for him to change his route, and follow the summons. When he went, he went with a speed in his heels he'd not believed himself capable of; and even though his lungs labored he squeezed from them sufficient breath for a few words in answer to Fletcher.

"I hear you," he said as he ran, "I hear you. Father...I hear you."

Tesla had told it right. A lousy nurse she was; but a very capable bully. The moment Grillo woke land found her back in his room she told him plainly that suffering in an alien bed was the act of a martyr and became him all too well. If he wanted to avoid cliché he should allow her to take him back to L.A. and deposit his sickly frame where he could be reassured by the scent of his own unwashed laundry.