Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"He's got an army too."

"I know."

"Where do they come from?"

"The same place everything originates. The mind."

"Everything?"

"You're asking questions again."

"I can't help it."

"Yes, everything. The world and all its works; its makings and unmakings; gods, lice and cuttlefish. All from the mind."

"I don't believe you."

"Why assume I care?"

"The mind can't create everything."

"I didn't say the human mind."

"Ah."

"If you listened more closely you wouldn't ask so many questions."

"But you want me to understand, or you wouldn't be spending all this time."

"Time out of time. But yes...yes, I want you to understand. Given the sacrifice you'll have to make it's important you know why."

"What sacrifice?"

"I told you: I can't get out of this place in my body. I'll be found, and murdered, like the others..."

She shuddered, despite the warmth.

"I don't think I follow," she said.

"Yes you do."

"You want me to get you out somehow? Carry your thoughts."

"Near enough."

"Can't I simply act for you?" she said. "Be your agent? I'm good out there."

"I'm sure you are."

"You brief me, I'll do what it takes."

Kissoon shook his head. "There's so much you don't know," he said. "So vast a picture, I haven't even tried to unveil. I doubt your imagination could cope with it."

"Try me," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Well, the issue here isn't simply the Jaff. He may taint Quiddity, but it'll survive."

"So what's the big problem?" Tesla said. "You give me all this shit about needing sacrifice. What for? If Quiddity can look after itself, what for?"

"Will you not simply trust me?"

She looked hard at him. The fire had sunk low but her eyes were by now well used to the amber gloom. Part of her wanted very much to put her trust in someone. But she'd spent most of her adult life learning the danger of that. Men, agents, studio executives, so many of-them had asked her for her trust in the past, and she'd given it, and been fucked over. It was too late to learn a new way now. She was cynical to the marrow. If she ever stopped being that she'd stop being Tesla, and she liked being Tesla. It therefore followed—as night, day—that cynicism suited her too.

So she said:

"No. I'm sorry. I can't trust you. Don't take it personally. I'd be the same whoever you were. I want to know the bottom line."

"What does that mean?"

"I want the truth. Or I don't give you anything."

"Are you so sure you can refuse?" Kissoon said.

She half turned her face from him, glancing back, tight-lipped, the way her favorite heroines did, with a look of accusation.

"That was a threat," she said.

"You could construe it that way," he observed.

"Well, fuck you—"

He shrugged. His passivity—the almost lazy way he regarded her—inflamed her further.

"I don't have to sit and listen to this, you know!"

"No?"

"No! You're hiding something from me."

"Now you're being ridiculous."

"I don't think so."

She stood up. His eyes didn't follow her face, but lingered at groin height. She was suddenly uncomfortable being naked in his presence. She wanted the clothes that were presumably still back at the Mission, stale and bloody as they'd be. If she was to get back there, she'd better start walking. She turned to the door.

Behind her, Kissoon said:

"Wait, Tesla. Please wait. The error's mine. I concede; the error's mine. Come back, will you?"

His tone was placating, but she read a less benign undertow. He's riled, she thought; for all his spiritual poise, he's pissed. It was a lesson in the facilities of dialogue to hear the bristle beneath the purr. She turned back to hear more, no longer certain that she could get the truth from this man. She only had to be threatened once to doubt.

"Go on," she said.

"You won't sit?"

"That's right," she said. She had to pretend she wasn't afraid, though suddenly she was; had to think of her skin as fashion enough. Stand, and be defiantly naked. "I won't sit."

"Then I'll try to explain as quickly as I can," he said. He'd effectively smoothed out every ambiguity in his manner. He was considerate; even humble.

"Even I, you must understand, don't have all the facts at my disposal," he said. "But I have enough, I hope, to convince you of the danger we're in."

"Who's we?"

"The inhabitants of the Cosm."

"Again?"

"Fletcher didn't explain this to you?"

"No."

He sighed.

"Think of Quiddity as a sea," he said.

"I'm thinking..."

"On one side of that sea is the reality we inhabit. A continent of being, if you like, the perimeters of which are sleep and death."

"So far, so good."

"Now...suppose there's another continent, on the other side of the sea."

"Another reality."

"Yes. As vast and complex as our own. As full of energies and species and appetites. But dominated, as the Cosm is, by one species in particular, with strange appetites."

"I don't like the sound of this."

"You wanted the truth."

"I'm not saying I believe you."

"That other place is the Metacosm. That species is the Iad Uroboros. They exist."

"And the appetites?" she said, not certain she really wanted to know.

"For purity. For singularity. For madness. "

"Some hunger."

"You were right when you accused me of not telling the truth. I told a part of it only. The Shoal did stand guard at the shores of Quiddity to prevent the Art from being misused by human ambition; but it also stood to watch the sea..."

"For an invasion?"

"That's what we feared. Maybe even expected. It wasn't simply our paranoia. The profoundest dreams of evil are those in which we scent the Iad across Quiddity. The deepest terrors, the foulest imaginings that haunt human heads are the echoes of their echoes. I am giving you more reason to be afraid, Tesla, than you could hear from any other lips. I'm telling you what only the strongest psyches can bear."

"Is there any good news?" Tesla said.

"Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?"

"Jesus," she replied. "And Buddha. Mohammed."

"Fragments of stories, massaged into cults by the Shoal. Distractions."

"I can't believe that."

"Why not? Are you a Christian?"

"No."

"Buddhist? Muslim? Hindu?"

"No. No. No."

"But you insist on believing the good news anyway," Kissoon said. "Convenient."

She felt she'd been struck, very hard, across the face, by a teacher who'd been three or four steps ahead of her throughout the entire argument, leading her steadily and stealthily to a place where she could not help but mouth absurdities. And absurd it was, to cling to hopes for Heaven when she poured piss on every religion that passed beneath her window. But she reeled not because Kissoon had scored a solid debating point. She'd taken her lumps in countless arguments, and come back to give worse. What made her sick to her stomach was that her defense against so much else he'd said was forfeit at the same moment. If even a part of what he'd told her was true, and the world she lived in—the Cosm—was in jeopardy, then what right did she have to value her little life over his desperate need for assistance? Even assuming she could find her way out of this time out of time she couldn't return to the world without wondering every moment if in leaving him she'd lost the Cosm's one chance for survival. She had to stay; had to give herself over to him, not because she entirely believed him, but because she couldn't risk being wrong.

"Don't be afraid," she heard him say. "The situation's no worse than it was five minutes ago, when you were quite the debater. You just know the truth now."