Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"Hi!" he said; a bland, casual greeting. "I wondered where you were. The Jaff said you'd be here."

"Don't touch the Nuncio," she told him. "It's dangerous."

"That's what I'm hoping," he said with a grin.

There was something in his hand, she saw. Catching her glance he proffered it. "Yeah, I got it," he said. The vial was indeed as Fletcher had described it.

"Throw it away," she advised, attempting to be cool.

"Was that what you were going to do?" he asked.

"Yes. I swear, yes. It's lethal."

She saw his eyes flit from her face to Raul, whose breath she heard behind and a little to the side of her. Tommy-Ray looked in no way concerned at being outnumbered. Indeed she wondered if there was any threat to life or limb that would dislodge the smug satisfaction from his face. The Nuncio, perhaps? God Almighty, what possibilities would it find waiting in his barbaric heart, to praise and magnify?

Again she said: "Destroy it, Tommy-Ray, before it destroys you."

"No way," he said. "The Jaff's got plans for it."

"And what about you, when you've finished working for him? He doesn't care about you."

"He's my father and he loves me," Tommy-Ray replied, with a certainty that would have been touching in a sane soul.

She began to move towards him, talking as she went. "Just listen to me for a few moments, will you...?"

He pocketed the Nuncio, and reached into his other pocket as he did so. He brought out a gun.

"What did you call the stuff?" he asked, pointing the weapon at her.

"Nuncio," she said, slowing her advance but still approaching steadily.

"No. Something else. You called it something else."

"Lethal."

He grinned. "Yeah," he said, slurring the word. "Lethal. That means it kills you, right?"

"Right."

"I like that."

"No, Tommy..."

"Don't tell me what I like," he said. "I said I like lethal and I mean it."

She suddenly realized she'd entirely miscalculated this scene. If she'd written it, he'd have held her at gunpoint till he made his escape. But he had his own scenario.

"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and pulled the trigger.

Unnerved by the episode at Ellen's house, Grillo had taken refuge in writing, a discipline he felt more in need of the deeper this pool of ambiguities became. At first it was easy. He struck out for the dry ground of fact, and stated it in prose Swift would have been proud of. Later he could extract from this account the sections to be sent through to Abernethy. For now his duty was to set down as much as he could remember.

Mid-way through the process, he got a call from Hotchkiss, who suggested that they might have an hour drinking and talking together. The Grove had only two bars, he explained, Starky's, in Deerdell, being the less tame of the two and consequently the preferable. An hour after the conversation, with the bulk of the previous night's events securely laid on paper, Grillo left the hotel and met with Hotchkiss. Starky's was practically empty. In one corner an old man sat quietly singing to himself, and there were two kids at the bar who looked too young to be drinking; otherwise they had the place to themselves. Even so, Hotchkiss barely raised his voice above a whisper throughout the entire conversation.

"You don't know much about me," he said at the outset. "I realized that last night. It's time you knew."

He didn't need any further encouragement to tell. His account was offered without emotion, as though the burden of feeling were so heavy it had long ago squeezed the tears from him. Grillo was glad of the fact. If the teller could be dispassionate then it freed him to be the same, probing between the lines of Hotchkiss's account for details the man had passed over. He spoke of Carolyn's part in the story first, of course, not praising or damning his daughter, merely describing her and the tragedy that had taken her from him. Then he threw the net of his story wider, and drew in others, first giving a thumbnail portrait of Trudi Katz, Joyce McGuire and Arleen Farrell, then relating how each of them had fared. Grillo was busily filling in details for himself as Hotchkiss spoke: creating a family tree whose roots went where Hotchkiss's account so often returned: underground.

"That's where the answers are," he said more than once. "I believe Fletcher and the Jaff, whoever they are, whatever they are, were responsible for what happened to my Carolyn. And to the other girls."

"They were in the caves all this time?"

"We saw them escape didn't we?" Hotchkiss said. "So yes, I think they waited down there all these years." He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch. "After last night at the Mall I just stayed up, trying to work it all out. Trying to make sense of it all."

"And?"

"I've decided to go down into the caves."

"What the hell for?"

"All those years, locked away, they must have been doing something. Maybe they left clues. Maybe we can find a way to destroy them down there."

"Fletcher's already gone," Grillo reminded him.

"Has he?" Hotchkiss said. "I don't know any more. Things linger, Grillo. They seem to disappear, but they linger, just out of sight. In the mind. In the ground. You climb down a little way and you're in the past. Every step another thousand years."

"My memory doesn't go back that far," Grillo quipped.

"But it does," Hotchkiss said, in deadly earnest. "It goes back to being a speck in the sea. That's what haunts us." He raised his hand. "Looks solid, doesn't it?" he said. "But it's mostly water." He seemed to be struggling for another thought, but it wouldn't come.

"The creatures the Jaff made look like they've been dug up," Grillo said. "You think that's what you're going to find down there?"

Hotchkiss's response was the thought he'd been unable to shape a moment earlier. "When she died," he said. "Carolyn I mean...when Carolyn died I had dreams of her just dissolving in front of me. Not rotting. Dissolving. Like the sea took her back."

"Do you still have those dreams?"

"Nope. I never dream now."

"Everybody dreams."

"Then I don't allow myself to remember them," Hotchkiss said. "So...are you with me?"

"With you on what?"

"The descent."

"You really want to do it? I thought it was virtually impossible to get down there."

"So, we die trying," Hotchkiss said.

"I've got a story to write."

"Let me tell you, my friend," Hotchkiss said. "That's where the story is. The only story. Right beneath our feet."

"I should warn you...I'm claustrophobic."

"We'll soon sweat that out of you," Hotchkiss replied, with a smile Grillo thought might have been a jot more reassuring.

Though Howie had valiantly fought off sleep through most of the afternoon, by early evening he could barely keep his eyes open. When he told Jo-Beth he wanted to return to the hotel Momma intervened, telling him she'd feel much comforted if he remained in the house. She made up the spare room (he'd spent the previous night on the sofa) and he retired to it. His body had taken a considerable beating in the last few days. His hand was still badly bruised, and his back, though the punctures- inflicted by the terata were not deep, still ached. None of which kept him from sleep for more than a few moments.

Jo-Beth prepared food for Momma—salad for Momma, as ever—and herself, going through the familiar domestic processes as though nothing in the world had changed since a week ago, and for short spaces of time, involved in her labors, forgetting the horrors. Then a look on her mother's face, or the sight of the shiny new lock on the back door, brought the memories back. She could no longer put them into any kind of order: there was just humiliation and pain upon further humiliation and further pain. Leering through it all the Jaff; near to her, too near to her, coming so close on occasion to persuading her to his vision the way he'd persuaded Tommy-Ray. Of all her fears the one that distressed her the most was that she might actually have been capable of joining the enemy. When he'd explained to her how he wanted reasons rather than feelings, she'd understood. Even been moved to sympathy. And that teasing talk of the Art, and the island he wanted to show her...