Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

The woman didn't stop sobbing, but tried to speak through her tears, which resulted in a watery and at times incoherent monologue.

"...don't know what he wants..." she seemed to be saying. "...after all this time...don't know what he wants..."

"Can I help?" Jo-Beth said. "Do you want me to take you home?"

The word home made Ruth look around at Jo-Beth, attempting to focus on her through the tears.

"...I don't know what he wants..." she said again.

"Who?" Jo-Beth said.

"...all these years...and he's got something hiding from me..."

"Your husband?"

"...I said nothing, hut I knew...I always knew...he loved somebody else...and now he's got her in the house..."

The tears redoubled. Jo-Beth went to her, and very gently claimed the packets of cereal from her hands, putting them back on the shelves. With her talismans gone, Ruth Gil-ford took fierce hold of Jo-Beth.

"...help me..." she said.

"Of course."

"I don't want to go home. He's got somebody there."

"All right. Not if you don't want to."

She started to coax the woman away from the cereal display. Once out of their influence, her anguish diminished somewhat.

"You're Jo-Beth, aren't you?" she managed.

"That's right."

"Will you take me to my car...I don't think I can get there on my own."

"We're going, you'll be fine," Jo-Beth reassured her, moving to Ruth's right-hand side so as to protect her from the gaze of those waiting in line if they chose to stare. She doubted they would. Ruth Gilford's collapse was too tender a sight for them to look straight at; it would remind them all too forcibly of what secrets they themselves were barely holding in check.

Momma was at the door, with William Witt. Jo-Beth decided to forsake introductions, which Ruth was in no state to respond to anyway, and just tell Momma she'd meet her at the bookstore, which had still been closed when they'd arrived. For the first time in her life, Lois was late opening up. But it was Momma who took the initiative.

"Mr. Witt will bring me home, Jo-Beth," she said. "Don't worry about me."

Jo-Beth glanced at Witt, who had the look of a man almost mesmerized.

"Are you sure?" she said. It had never occurred to her before but perhaps the ever unctuous Mr. Witt was the type Momma had been warning her about all these years. The deep, silent type whose secrets were always the most depraved. But Momma was insistent; almost casual in the way she waved Jo-Beth off.

Crazy, Jo-Beth thought as she escorted Ruth to the car, the whole world's gone crazy. People changing at a moment's notice, as though the way they'd been all these years was just a pretense: Momma sick, Mr. Witt neat, Ruth Gilford in charge. Were they just reinventing themselves, or was this the way they'd always been?

As they got to the car Ruth Gilford was taken over by another, even more desperate, bout of crying, and tried to return to the supermarket, insistent that she couldn't go back home without cereal. Jo-Beth gently persuaded her otherwise, and volunteered to drive home with her, an invitation which was gratefully accepted.

Jo-Beth's thoughts returned to Momma as she drove Ruth home, but they were literally overtaken, as a convoy of four black stretch limos purred past and turned up the Hill, their presence so utterly alien they might just have driven in from another dimension.

Visitors, she thought. As if there weren't enough.

"So it begins," said the Jaff.

He was standing at the highest window of Coney Eye, looking down upon the driveway. It was a little before noon, and the limos gliding up the driveway announced the first of the party guests. He would have liked to have Tommy-Ray at his side at this juncture, but the boy had not yet returned from his trip to the Mission. No matter. Lamar had proved a more than able substitute. There had been one uncomfortable moment, when the Jaff had finally put off the mask of being Buddy Vance and presented his true face to the comedian, but it hadn't taken long to bring the man around. In some regard he was more preferable company to Tommy-Ray; more sensual, more cynical. What was more he had a thorough knowledge of the guests who would soon be gathering in Buddy Vance's memory; a more thorough knowledge, indeed, than the widow Rochelle. She had sunk deeper and deeper into a drug-induced stupor since the previous evening; a condition which Lamar had taken sexual advantage of, much to the Jaff's amusement. Once upon a time (so long ago) he might have done the same, of course. No, not might, would. Rochelle Vance was undoubtedly beautiful, and her addiction, informed as it was by a constant undercurrent of rage, made her even more attractive. But these were affairs of the flesh, and for another life. There were more urgent pursuits: namely, the power to be garnered from the guests who were even now gathering below. Lamar had run down the list with him, offering some savage observation or other on practically every one. Corrupt lawyers, addicted actors, reformed whores, pimps, priapists, hitmen, white men with black souls, hot men with cold, ass-kissers, coke-sniffers, the wretched high, the more wretched low, egotists, onanists and hedonists to a man. Where better to find the kind of forces he needed to keep him from harm when the Art opened? He would find fears in these addicted, bewildered, inflated souls of a kind he'd never have found in the mere bourgeois. From them he'd raise terata the like of which the world had never seen. Then he'd be ready. Fletcher was dead, and his army, if it had indeed manifested itself, was keeping its head low.

There was nothing left between the Jaff and Quiddity.

As he stood at the window and watched the victims disembark, greeting one another with rhinestone smiles and pinched kisses, his thoughts went—of all places—to that dead-letter room in Omaha, Nebraska, where, so many lives ago, he'd first had a hint of America's secret self. He remembered Homer, who'd opened the door to that treasure house, and later died against it, his life stabbed out by the blunt-bladed knife the Jaff still carried in his jacket pocket. Death had meant something then. Been an experience to go in dread of. It wasn't until he'd stepped into the Loop that he'd realized how irrelevant such fears were, when time could be suspended, even by a minor charlatan like Kissoon. Presumably the shaman was still secure in his refuge, as far from his spiritual creditors, or the lynch-mob, as it was possible to get. Lingering in the Loop, planning the getting of power. Or holding it at bay.

That last notion occurred to him now for the first time, like a long-postponed solution to a puzzle he hadn't even known he'd been gnawing at. Kissoon had been holding the moment because if he once let it slip he'd unleash his own death...

"Well..." he murmured.

Lamar was behind him. "Well, what?"

"Just musing," the Jaff said. He turned from the window. "Is the widow already downstairs?"

"I'm trying to rouse her."

"Who's greeting the guests?"

"Nobody."

"Go to it."

"I thought you wanted me here."

"Later. Once they've all arrived you can bring them up one by one."

"As you wish."

"One question."

"Only one?"

"Why aren't you afraid of me?"

Lamar narrowed his already narrow eyes. Then said:

"I've still got my sense of the ridiculous."

Without waiting for any riposte from the Jaff he opened the door and headed about his duties as host. The Jaff turned back to the window. Another limo was at the gates, this one white, its driver showing his passengers' invitations to the guards.

"One by one," the Jaff murmured to himself. "One by wretched one."

Grillo's invitation to the party at Coney Eye had been delivered by hand mid-morning, its courier Ellen Nguyen. Her manner was friendly but brisk; there was no trace of the intimacy that had flowered between them the previous afternoon. He invited her into his hotel room but she insisted that there was no time: