Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

The dog won, working itself up into a stabbing frenzy then stopping suddenly. On cue one of the men sitting in the front row stepped up and separated the pair, the animal instantly uninterested. Her partner led away, the woman was left center stage to gather up a scattering of clothes she'd presumably shed before Tommy-Ray had entered. She then exited through the same side door where the dog and its pimp had gone, her face the same slack mask it had been from the outset. There was apparently another part of the show to follow, because nobody vacated their seats. But Tommy-Ray had seen all he needed to see. He made his way back towards the door, pushing through a soft-bodied knot of newcomers, and out into the dusky bar.

It was only much later, when he was almost at the Mission, that he realized his pockets had been picked. There was no time to go back, he knew; nor indeed any purpose. The thief could have been any of the men who'd crowded his path as he'd left. Besides, it had been worth the lost dollars. He had found a new definition of death. Not even new. Simply his first and only.

The sun had long set by the time he drove up the hill towards the Mission, but as he began the ascent a distinct sense of deja vu crept over him. Was he seeing the place with the Jaff's eyes? Whether or not, the recognition proved useful. Knowing that Fletcher's agent had undoubtedly arrived ahead of him he decided to leave the car a little way down the hill and climb the rest of the way on foot so as not to alert her to his coming. Dark though it was, he didn't travel blind. His feet knew the way even though his memory didn't.

He'd come prepared for violence, should the occasion demand. The Jaff had provided him with a gun—courtesy of one of the many victims the Jaff had relieved of their terata— and the idea of using it was undoubtedly appealing. Now, after a climb which had made his chest ache, he was within sight of the Mission. The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

His head tender with such thoughts, he trod through the withering blossoms to the Mission.

Raul's hut was fifty yards beyond the main building, a primitive structure in which two occupants were a crowd. He depended, he explained to Tesla, entirely on the generosity of the local people, who supplied him with food and clothing in return for his being caretaker of the Mission. Despite the poverty of his means he had been at pains to elevate the hut from a hovel. There were signs everywhere of a delicate sensibility at work. The squat candles on the table were seated in a ring of stones chosen for their smoothness; the blanket on the simple cot had been decorated with the feathers of sea-birds.

"I have one vice only," Raul said, once he'd set Tesla down in the single chair. "I have it from my father."

"What's that?"

"I smoke cigarettes. One a day. You'll share with me."

"I used to smoke," Tesla began, "but I don't any longer."

"Tonight you will," Raul said, leaving no room for dissension. "We'll smoke to toast my father."

He brought a hand-rolled cigarette from a small tin, along with matches. She watched his face as he went about the business of lighting it up. All that she'd found unnerving about him at first sight remained unnerving. His features were neither simian nor human, but the unhappiest of marriages between the two. And yet in every other respect—his speech, his manners, the way he was even now holding the cigarette between his long, dark fingers—he was so very civilized. The kind of man, indeed, mother might have wished her to marry, had he not been an ape.

"Fletcher hasn't gone, you know," he said to her, handing the cigarette across. She took it reluctantly, not particularly eager to put to her lips what had been between his. But he watched her, candle light flickering in his eyes, until she obliged, smiling with pleasure at her sharing with him. "He became something else, I'm sure," he went on. "Something other."

"I'll toast that," she said, taking another drag. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps the tobacco they smoked down here was a little more potent than in L.A.

"What's in this?" she said.

"Good stuff," he replied. "You like it?"

"They bring you dope as well?"

"They grow it themselves," Raul said in a matter-of-fact way.

"Good for them," she said, and claimed a third hit before handing it back to him. It was indeed strong stuff. Her mouth was already half way through a sentence her mind had no idea of how to finish before she knew she was even speaking.

"...this is the night I tell my kids about...except that I won't have any kids...well, my grandchildren then...I'll tell them when I sat with a man who used to be a monkey...you don't mind me telling you that do you? Only it's my first time...and we sat and we talked about his friend...and my friend...who used to be a man..."

"And when you tell them," Raul said, "what will you say about yourself?"

"About myself?"

"Where will you fit into the pattern? What are you going to become?"

She mused on this. "Do I have to become anything?" she asked eventually.

Raul passed the remnants of the cigarette back to her. "Everything is becoming. Sitting here, we're becoming."

"What?"

"Older. Closer to death."

"Oh shit. I don't want to be closer to death."

"No choice," Raul said simply. Tesla shook her head. It kept moving, long after the motion had ceased.

"I want to understand," she said finally.

"Anything in particular?"

She mused a little more, running through all the possible options, and came up with one.

"Everything?" she said.

He laughed, and his laughter sounded like bells to her. Good trick, she was about to tell him, until she realized that he was up and at the door.

"Somebody's at the Mission," she heard him say.

"...come to light the candles," she suggested, her head seeming to precede her body in pursuit of him.

"No," he said to her as he stepped out into the darkness. "They don't step where the bells are..."

She had been staring into the candle flame as she'd mulled over Raul's questions, and its image was imprinted on the darkness she now stumbled through, a will o' the wisp that might have led her over the cliff-edge had she not followed his voice. As they approached the walls he told her to stay where she was but she ignored him and followed anyway. The candlelighters had indeed come visiting; their handiwork threw its glamour through from the room of portraits. Though the contents of Raul's cigarette had put space between her thoughts they were cogent enough to fear that she'd idled too long, and that her purpose here was now in jeopardy. Why hadn't she just found the Nuncio immediately and pitched it into the ocean as Fletcher had directed? Her irritation with herself made her bold. In the murk of the mural room she managed to overtake Raul and so step through into the candlelit laboratory first.

It was not candles that had been lit here, nor was the visitor a supplicant.

In the middle of the chamber a small, smoky fire had been lit, and a man—with his back at present turned to her— was ferreting through the tangle of equipment with his bare hands. She had not expected to recognize him when he looked in her direction, which was, on reflection, foolish. In the last few days she'd come to know most of the actors in this piece, if not by name then at least by sight. This one she knew by both. Tommy-Ray McGuire. He turned full face. In the perfect symmetry of his features a little ball of lunacy— the Jaff's inheritance—bounded back and forth, glittering.