Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"You've been working hard," she said, thinking it was sweat. Then she realized her error. Not sweat at all; tears.

"Oh, poor Raul," she said, and sat up to embrace him. "Did I disappear completely?"

He pressed himself to her. "First like fog," he said. "Then...just gone."

"Why are we here?" she said. "I was in the Mission when he shot me."

Thinking of the shot, she looked down at where the bullet had struck. There was no wound; not even blood.

"The Nuncio," she said. "It healed me."

The fact was not lost on the women. Seeing the unmarked skin they muttered prayers, and backed away.

"No..." she murmured, still looking down at her body. "It wasn't the Nuncio. This is the body I imagined."

"Imagined?" said Raul.

"Conjured," she replied, scarcely even aware of Raul's confusion because she had a puzzle of her own. Her left nipple, twice the size of its neighbor, was now on the right. She kept staring at them, shaking her head. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd make a mistake about. Somehow, on the journey to the Loop, or back, she'd been flipped. She brought her legs up for study. Several scratches—Dutch's work—that had adorned one shin now marked the other.

"I can't figure it," she said to Raul.

Not even understanding the question he was hard-pressed to reply, so simply shrugged.

"Never mind," she said, and started to get dressed.

Only then did she ask what had happened to the Nuncio.

"Did I get it all?" she said.

"No. The Death-Boy got it."

"Tommy-Ray? Oh Jesus. So now the Jaff has a son and a half."

"But you were touched too," Raul said. "So was I. It got into my hand. Climbed up to the elbow."

"So it's us against them."

Raul shook his head. "I can't be of use to you," he said.

"You can and you must," she said. "There's so many questions we have to have answered. I can't do it on my own. You must come with me."

His reluctance was perfectly apparent without his voicing it.

"I know you're afraid. But please, Raul. You brought me back from the dead—"

"Not me."

"You helped. You wouldn't want that wasted, would you?"

She could hear something of Kissoon's persuasions in her own, and didn't much like the sound. But then she'd never experienced a steeper learning curve in her life than in the time she'd spent with Kissoon. He'd made his mark without so much as laying a finger on her. But if she'd been asked whether he was a liar or a prophet, a savior or a lunatic, she couldn't have said. Perhaps that ambiguity was the steepest part of the curve, though what lesson she'd gained from it she couldn't say.

Her thoughts went back to Raul, and his reluctance. There was no time for involved argument. "You simply have to come," she told him. "There's no getting out of it."

"But the Mission—"

"—is empty, Raul. The only treasure it had was the Nuncio, and that's gone."

"It had memories," he said softly, the tense of his reply signalling his acceptance.

"There'll be other memories. Better times to remember," she said. "Now...if you've got people to say goodbye to, say it, because we're rolling—"

He nodded, and began to address the women in Spanish. Tesla had a smattering of the language; enough to confirm that he was indeed making his farewells. Leaving him to it, she headed up the hill towards the car.

As she walked the solution to the puzzle of the flipped body appeared in her head, without the problem being consciously turned. In Kissoon's hut she'd imagined herself the way she most often saw herself: in a mirror. How many times in her thirty odd years had she looked at her own reflection, building up a portrait in which right was left, and vice versa?

She'd come back from the Loop a different woman, literally; a woman who'd only ever existed as an image in glass. Now that image was flesh and blood, and walking the world. Behind its face the mind remained the same, she hoped, albeit touched by the Nuncio, and by knowing Kissoon. Not, in sum, negligible influences.

What with one thing and another she was a whole new story. No better time to tell herself to the world than the present.

Tomorrow might never come.

Tommy-Ray had been in the driver's seat of a car since his sixteenth birthday. Wheels had signalled freedom from Momma, the Pastor, the Grove and all they stood for. Now he was heading back to the very place a few years ago he couldn't have escaped from fast enough, his foot on the accelerator every mile of the way. He wanted to walk the Grove again with the news his body carried, wanted to go back to his father, who'd taught him so much. Until the Jaff the best life had offered was an off-shore wind and a west swell at Topanga; him on a crest knowing the girls were all watching him from the beach. But he'd always known those high times couldn't last forever. New heroes came along, summer after summer. He'd been one of them, supplanting surfers no more than a couple of years older, who weren't quite as lithe. Boy-men like himself who'd been the cream of the swell the season before, suddenly old news. He wasn't stupid. He knew it was only a matter of time before he joined their ranks.

But now, he had a purpose in his belly and brain he'd

never had before. He'd discovered ways to think and behave the airheads at Topanga never even guessed existed. Much of that he had to thank the Jaff for. But even his father, for all his wild advice, hadn't prepared him for what had happened at the Mission. He was a myth now. Death at the wheel of a Chevy, racing for home. He knew music that would have people dancing till they dropped. And when they dropped, and went to meat, he knew all about that too. He'd seen the spectacle at work on his own flesh. It gave him a boner remembering.

But the night's fun had only just started. Less than a hundred miles north of the Mission his route took him through a small village on the fringes of which lay a cemetery. The moon was still high. Its brightness gleamed on the tombs, washing the color from the flowers that were laid here and there. He stopped the car, to get a better look. After all, this was his territory from now on. It was home.

If he'd needed any further proof that what had happened at the Mission was not the invention of a crazyman, he got it when he pushed open the gate and wandered in. There was no wind to stir the grass, which grew to knee height in several places, where tombs had been left untended. But there was movement there nevertheless. He advanced a few more paces, and saw human figures rising into view from a dozen places. They were dead. Had their appearance not testified to the fact the luminescence of their bodies—which were as bright as the bone shard he'd found beside the car—would have marked them as part of his clan.

They knew who had come to visit them. Their eyes, or in the case of the ancients among them, their sockets, were set on him as they moved to do him homage. None even glanced at the ground as they came, though it was uneven. They knew this turf too well, familiar with the spots where badly built tombs had toppled, or a casket been pushed back up to the surface by some motion in the earth. Their progress was, however, slow. He was in no hurry. He sat himself down on the grave which contained, the stone recorded, seven children and their mother, and watched the ghosts come his way. The closer they came the more of their condition he saw. It wasn't pretty. A wind blew out of them, twisting them out of true. Their faces were either too wide or too long, their eyes bulging, their mouths blown open, cheeks flopping. Their ugliness put Tommy-Ray in mind of a film he'd seen of pilots enduring G-force, the difference being that these were not volunteers. They suffered against their will.