Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

The protector of the sanctum stood in the corner furthest from Tesla, beyond the shafts from the window. She could make out little about him. Only that he was either masked or had features as broadly formed as those of a mask. Nothing she'd experienced here so far led her to fear for her safety. Though she was alone, she felt no anxiety. This was a sanctuary not a place of violence. Besides, she came on the business of the deity that had once worked in this very chamber. She had to speak with his authority.

"My name's Tesla," she said. "I was sent here by Doctor Richard Fletcher."

She saw the man in the corner respond to the name with a slow upward motion of the head; then heard him sigh.

"Fletcher?" he said.

"Yes," Tesla replied. "Do you know who he is?"

The answer was another question delivered with a heavily Hispanic accent: "Do I know you?"

"I told you," Tesla said. "He sent me here. I've come to do what he himself asked me to do."

The man stepped away from the wall, far enough for his features to touch the beams.

"Could he not come himself?" he said.

It took Tesla a few moments to muster a reply. The sight of the man's heavy brow and lumpen nose had thrown her thoughts into a spin. Quite simply she'd never seen in the flesh a face so ugly.

"Fletcher isn't alive any more," she replied after a moment, her thoughts half on repugnance, half on how instinctively she'd avoided using the word dead.

The wretched features in front of her became sorrowful, something in their plasticity almost making a caricature of that emotion.

"I was here when he left," the man said. "I've been waiting for him to...come back."

She knew who he was as soon as he proffered this information. Fletcher had told her there might be a living remnant of the Great Work left.

"Raul?" she said.

The deep-set eyes grew wide. They showed no whites. "You do know him," he said, and took another quicker step into the light, which carved his features so cruelly she could barely look at him. She'd countless times seen creatures on the screen more studiedly vile than this—and the night before been bloodied by a beast of nightmare design—but the confusion of signals from this hybrid distressed her more than anything she'd set eyes on. It was so close to being human, yet her innards were not deceived. The response taught her something, though she wasn't quite certain what. She put the lesson aside for more urgent stuff.

"I've come to destroy whatever remains of the Nuncio," she said.

"Why?"

"Because Fletcher wants it that way. His enemies are still in the world, even though he isn't. He fears for the consequences if they come here and find the experiment."

"But I've waited..." Raul said.

"It's good that you did. It's good you guarded the place."

"I haven't moved. All these years. I've stayed where my father made me."

"How have you survived?"

Raul looked away from Tesla, squinting into the sun, which was almost gone from sight.

"The people look after me," he said. "They don't understand what happened here, but they know I was a part of it. The Gods were on this hill, once. That's what they believe. Let me show you."

He turned and led Tesla out of the laboratory. Beyond the door was another, barer chamber; this with a single window. The walls had been painted, she saw; murals whose naive rendering merely emphasized the passion with which they were felt.

"This is the story of that night," Raul said, "as they believe it happened."

There was no more light here than in the room they'd exited, but the murk lent mystery to the images.

"Here's the Mission as it was," Raul said, indicating an almost emblematic picture of the cliff upon which they were standing. "And there's my father."

Fletcher stood in front of the hill, face white and wild against its darkness, his eyes twin moons. Strange forms sprang from his ears and mouth, and hung around his head like satellites.

"What are those?" Tesla enquired.

"His ideas," came Raul's reply. "I painted those."

"What kind of ideas look like that?"

"Things from the sea," came the reply. "Everything comes from the sea. Fletcher told me that. At the beginning, the sea. At the end, the sea. And between—"

"Quiddity," said Tesla.

"What?"

"He didn't tell you about Quiddity?"

"No."

"Where humans go to dream?"

"I'm not human," Raul gently reminded her. "I'm his experiment."

"Surely that's what made you human," Tesla said. "Isn't that what the Nuncio does?"

"I don't know," Raul said simply. "Whatever it did to me, I don't thank it for. I was happier...being an ape. If I'd stayed an ape I'd be dead by now."

"Don't talk that way," Tesla said. "Fletcher wouldn't want to hear you full of regrets."

"Fletcher left me," Raul reminded her. "He taught me enough to know what I could never be, then he left me."

"He had his reasons. I've seen his enemy, the Jaff. The man has to be stopped."

"There—" said Raul, pointing to a place further along the wall. "There's Jaffe."

The portrait was able enough. Tesla recognized the devouring stare, the swollen head. Had Raul actually seen Jaffe in his evolved condition or was this portrait of man as monstrous babe an instinctive response? She had no opportunity to enquire. Raul was coaxing her away again.

"I'm thirsty," he said. "We can look at the rest later."

"It'll be too dark."

"No. They'll come up and light candles when the sungoes. Come and talk with me for a while. Tell me how my father died."

It took Tommy-Ray longer to reach the Mision de Santa Catrina than the woman he was racing against because of an incident along the route which, though minor, showed him a place in himself he would later come to know very well. In a small town south of Ensenada, stopping in the early evening to get something for his parched throat, he found himself in a bar that offered—for a mere ten bucks—access to an entertainment undreamed of in Palomo Grove. It was too tasty an offer to refuse. He put his money down, bought a beer, and was allowed entrance to a smoke-filled space which could only have been twice the size of his bedroom. There was an audience of maybe ten men, sprawled on creaking chairs. They were watching a woman having sex with a large black dog. He found nothing about the scene arousing. Neither, apparently, did the rest of the audience; at least not in the sexual sense. They leaned forward to watch the display with an excitement he didn't understand until the beer began to work on his wearied system, tunnelling his vision until the woman's face mesmerized him. She might once have been pretty, but her face, like her body, was wasted now, her arms showing plain proof of the addiction that had brought her so low. She teased the hound with the expertise of one who'd done this countless times before, then went on all fours before it. It sniffed, then lazily put itself to the task. Only once it had mounted her did Tommy-Ray realize what claim her expression had upon him, and, presumably, upon the others. She looked like somebody already dead. The thought was a door in his head opening on to a stinking yellow place; a wallowing place. He'd seen this look before, not just on the faces of girls in the skin mags, but on celebrities trapped by cameras. Sex-zombies, star-zombies; dead folks passing for living. When he plugged back into the scene in front of him the dog had found its rhythm, and was making at the girl with doggy lust, foam dripping from its mouth on her back; and this time—thinking of the girl as dead—it was sexy. The more excited the animal became the more excited he became and the more dead the woman looked to him, feeling the dog's dick in her and his eyes on her, until it became a race between him and the dog as to which was going to finish first.