Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

Suddenly, it was full of him; or he of it; or both. His hands came off his face like suckers, and he breathed again.

After half a dozen gasps he sat up and looked down at his palms. They were bloody, both from his cut face and from their own injuries, but the stains faded before a more insistent reality. Granted a grave-dweller's sight, he saw his own flesh corrupting before his eyes. The skin darkened and swelled with gases, then broke open, the lesions spilling pus and water. Seeing, he grinned, and felt the grin spreading up from the corners of his mouth to his ears as his face split. It wasn't just the bone of his smile he was showing; the rods of his arms, wrists and fingers were appearing now, as decay uncovered them. Beneath his shirt, his heart and lungs sank into sewerage and drained away; his balls were washed with them; his withered dick the same.

And still the grin grew wider, until all the muscle had gone from his face and he was smiling the Death-Boy's smile, wide as any smile could get.

The vision didn't linger. Once given, it was gone, and he was left kneeling on the sharp stones, staring down at his bloody palms.

"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and stood up, turning to face the lucky fuck who'd be the first to see him transfigured.

The man had stopped in his tracks, a few yards off.

"Look at me," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm the Death-Boy."

The poor shit just stared, not understanding. Tommy-Ray laughed. All desire to kill the man had gone out of him. He wanted this witness alive, to testify in days to come. To say: I was there, and it was awesome, seeing Tommy-Ray McGuire die and rise again.

He took a moment to look at the remains of the Nuncio-fragments of the vial and a few spots of spilled fluid on the stones. There was not enough to gather up and take back to the Jaff. But he was bringing something better now. Himself, changed; cleansed of fear, cleansed of flesh. Without looking back at the witness, he about-faced and left him to his confusion.

Though the glory of corruption had left him now, a subtle aftersight remained—which he didn't comprehend until a piece of stone underfoot caught his eye. He bent to pick it up; a pretty thing for Jo-Beth, maybe. Once in his hand he realized it was not stone at all, but a bird's skull, fractured and dirty. To his eyes, it gleamed.

Death shines, he thought. When I see it, it shines.

Pocketing the skull he sauntered back to the car and reversed down the hill until the road offered space enough for him to turn. Then he was away at a speed that would have been suicidal on such bends and in such darkness had suicide not been one of his many playthings now.

Raul put his fingers to one of the splashes of Nuncio. It rose in beads to meet his hand, winding into the spirals of his fingerprints, then climbing up through the marrow of hand, wrist and forearm, before petering out at his elbow. He felt, or imagined he felt, some subtle reconfiguration in his muscle, as though his hand, which had never quite lost its simian proportions, was being coaxed a little closer to the human. He let the sensation delay him only a moment; Tesla's condition concerned him more than his own.

It was as he went to make his way back up the hill that it occurred to him that the drops of Nuncio left in the ground might somehow help heal the woman. If she didn't have comfort of some kind soon she'd surely die. What was there to lose in letting the Great Work do what it could?

With that thought in mind he started back towards the Mission, knowing that were he to attempt to touch the broken vial it would be he who received its benefit. Tesla would have to be carried down the road to where these precious drops were scattered.

The women had set their candles all around Tesla. She looked like a corpse already. He was swift with his instructions. They wrapped her up and helped him carry her down the road a little way. She wasn't heavy. He took her head and shoulders and two of the women supported her lower half, a third held the bundled shirt, now thoroughly soaked, to the bullet hole.

It was a slow process, stumbling in the darkness, but having been twice touched by the Nuncio, Raul had no difficulty finding the spot again. Like called to like. Warning the women to keep feet and fingers clear of the spilled fluid he took Tesla's weight entirely into his own arms and laid her down, her head haloed by splashes of the Nuncio. The remains of the vial itself still contained the bulk of the fluid; at most, a teaspoonful. With great gentleness, he turned her head towards the vial. At her proximity the fluid inside had begun a firefly dance—

—the poison brightness that had rained on Tesla as she fell before Tommy-Ray's bullet had solidified in seconds: become a gray, featureless place where she lay now without any sense of how she'd come to be there. She couldn't remember the Mission, Raul, or Tommy-Ray. Even her own name was beyond her. It was all outside the wall, where she couldn't go. Perhaps would never go again. She had no feelings either way about this. With no memory, she had nothing to mourn.

But now something began to scratch at the wall from the other side. She heard it humming to itself as it worked, like a lover digging at the stone of her cell, determined to reach her. She listened, and waited, no longer quite so forgetful, nor so indifferent to escape.. Her name came back to her first, heard in the hum from outside. Then a memory of the pain the bullet had brought with it, and the grinning face of Tommy-Ray, and Raul, and the Mission, and—

Nuncio.

That was the power she'd come looking for, and now in its turn it was looking for her, eroding the walls of limbo. Her exchanges with Fletcher about its transforming talents had been all too brief, but she understood its basic function well enough. It ran with whatever baton it was passed; a race against entropy towards some conclusion not even its client/victim could guess, much less its subject. Was she ready for such a proving touch? It had made a swollen evil of Jaffe, and a bewildered saint of Fletcher. What might it make of her?

At the last possible moment Raul doubted the wisdom of this medicine, and reached to take Tesla out of the way of the Nuncio's touch, but it was already leaping from the shattered vial towards her face. She inhaled it like a liquid breath. Around her head the other drops flew towards her scalp and neck.

She gasped, her whole body responding with tremors to the entry of the messenger. Then, just as suddenly, every jitter in her joints and nerves ceased.

Raul murmured:

"Don't die. Don't die."

He was about to put his mouth to hers in one last snatch at preserving her when he saw the motion behind her closed lids. Her eyes were roving back and forth wildly, scanning some sight only she could see.

"Alive..."he murmured.

Behind him, the women—who'd witnessed this entire scene without comprehending any of it—began to pray and wail, either out of gratitude or of fear of what they'd seen. He didn't know. But he added his own muttered prayers, no more certain of his reasons than of theirs.

The walls went suddenly. Like a dam first breached in a tiny place, then broken from side to side by the flood behind it. She had expected the world she'd left to be waiting when the walls were rubble. She was wrong. There was no sign of the Mission, nor of Raul. Instead there was laid before her a desert lit by a sun which had yet to reach its full ferocity, and crossed by a gusting wind which picked her up the instant the walls fell, and carried her over the ground. Her velocity was terrifying, but she had no way to slow herself, or indeed change direction, because she possessed neither limbs nor body. She was thought here; pure, in a pure place.

Then, ahead, a sight that gave the lie to that. There was sign of human occupancy on the horizon; a town set in the middle of this nowhere. Her speed didn't slow as she approached. This, apparently, was not her destination, if indeed she had one. It occurred to her that perhaps she could simply travel and travel. That this state of being was simply one of motion; a journey without purpose or conclusion. She had time, as she passed through the Main Street, to register that though the town was solidly constructed stores and houses arrayed to either side—it was also completely characterless. That is, unpeopled, and unparticularized. There were no signs on the stores or at the cross-streets; no mark of human presence whatsoever. Even as she registered this weirdness she was at the other side of the town, and once more speeding over sun-scorched ground. The sight of the town, however brief, had given weight to her suspicion that she was utterly alone here. Not only was her journey to be endless, but unaccompanied too. This was Hell, she thought; or a good working definition of same.