Clive Barker - Imajica

‘Are you sure?’ Taylor said. Knots of discomfort had appeared on his face as Gentle talked, and were tightening.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I want to hear the rest.’

‘There’s nothing else to hear. Maybe Pie’s out there somewhere, but I don’t know where.’

‘Is that why you want to float? Are you hoping - ’ he stopped, his breathing suddenly turning into gasps. ‘You know, maybe you should fetch Clem,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

Gentle went to the door, but before he reached it Taylor said:

‘You’ve got to understand, Gentle. Whatever the mystery is, you’ve got to see it for us both.’

With his hand on the door, and ample reason to beat a hasty retreat, Gentle knew that he could still choose silence over a reply; could take his leave of the ancient without accepting the quest. But that if he answered, and took it, he was bound.

‘I’m going to understand,’ he said, meeting Taylor’s despairing gaze. ‘We both are. I swear.’

Taylor managed to smile in response, but it was fleeting. Gentle opened the door and headed out on to the landing. Clem was waiting.

‘He needs you,’ Gentle said.

Clem stepped inside and closed the bedroom door. Feeling suddenly exiled, Gentle headed downstairs. Jude was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with a piece of rock.

‘How is he?’ she wanted to know.

‘Not good,’ Gentle said. ‘Clem’s gone in to look after him.’

‘Do you want some tea?’

‘No thanks. What I really need’s some fresh air. I think I’ll take a walk around the block.’

There was a fine drizzle falling when he stepped outside, which was welcome after the suffocating heat of the sickroom. He knew the neighbourhood scarcely at all, so he decided to stay close to the house, but his distraction soon got the better of that plan and he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought and the maze of streets. There was a freshness in the wind that made him sigh for escape. This was no place to solve mysteries. After the turn of the year everybody would be stepping up to a new round of resolutions and ambitions, plotting their futures like well-oiled farces. He wanted none of it.

As he began the trek back to the house he remembered that Jude had asked him to pick up milk and cigarettes on his journey, and that he was returning empty-handed. He turned round and went in search of both, which took him longer than he expected. When he finally rounded the corner, goods in hand, there was an ambulance outside the house. The front door was open. Jude stood on the step, watching the drizzle. She had tears on her face.

‘He’s dead,’ she said.

He stood rooted to the spot a yard from her. ‘When?’ he said, as if it mattered. ‘Just after you left.’

He didn’t want to weep; not with her watching. There was too much else that he didn’t want to stumble over in her presence. Stony, he said:

‘Where’s Clem?’

‘With him upstairs. Don’t go up. There’s already too many people.’

She spied the cigarettes in his hand, and reached for the packet. As her hand grazed his, their grief ran between them. Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss, or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies, and were weeping at their own confusion.

Since the meeting at which the subject of the Tabula Rasa’s library had first been raised, Bloxham had several times planned to perform the duty he’d volunteered himself for, and go into the bowels of the Tower to check on the security of the collection. But he’d twice put off the task, telling himself that there were more urgent claims on his time: specifically, the organization of the Society’s Great Purge. He might have postponed a third time had the matter not been raised again, this in a casual aside from Charlotte Feaver, who’d been equally vociferous about the safety of the books at that first gathering, and now offered to accompany him on the investigation. Women baffled Bloxham, and the attraction they exercised over him had always to be set beside the discomfort he felt in their company, but in recent days he’d felt an intensity of sexual need he’d seldom, if ever, experienced before. Not even in the privacy of his own prayers did he dare confess the reason. The Purge excited him—it roused his blood and his manhood - and he had no doubt that Charlotte had responded to this heat, even though he’d made no outward show of it. He promptly accepted her offer, and at her suggestion they agreed to meet at the Tower on the last evening of the old year. He brought a bottle of champagne.

‘We may as well enjoy ourselves,’ he said, as they headed down through the remains of Roxborough’s original house, a floor of which had been preserved and concealed within the plainer walls of the Tower.

Neither of them had ventured into this underworld for many years. It was more primitive than either of them remembered. Electric light had been crudely installed -cables from which bare bulbs hung looped along the passages - but otherwise the place was just as it had been in the first years of the Tabula Rasa. The cellars had been built for the express purpose of housing the Society’s collection; thus for the millennium. A fan of identical corridors spread from the bottom stairs, lined on both sides with shelves that rose up the brick walls to the curve of the ceilings. The intersections were elaborately vaulted, but otherwise there was no decoration.

‘Shall we break open the bottle before we start?’ Bloxham suggested.

‘Why not? What are we drinking from?’

His reply was to bring two fluted glasses from his pocket. She claimed them from him while he opened the bottle, its cork coming with no more than a decorous sigh, the sound of which carried away through the labyrinth, and failed to return. Glasses filled, they drank to the Purge.

‘Now we’re here,’ Charlotte said, pulling her furs up around her, ‘what are we looking for?’

‘Any sign of tampering or theft,’ Bloxham said. ‘Shall we split up or go together?’

‘Oh, together,’ she replied.

It had been Roxborough’s claim that these shelves carried every single volume of any significance in the hemisphere, and as they wandered together, surveying the tens of thousands of manuscripts and books, it was easy to believe the boast.

‘How in hell’s name do you suppose they gathered all this stuff up?’ Charlotte wondered as they walked.

‘I daresay the world was smaller then,’ Bloxham remarked. ‘They all knew each other, didn’t they? Casanova, Sartori, the Comte de Saint-Germain. All fakes and buggers together.’

‘Fakes? Do you really think so?’

‘Most of them,’ Bloxham said, wallowing in the ill-deserved role of expert. ‘There may have been one or two, I suppose, who knew what they were doing.’ ‘Have you ever been tempted?’ Charlotte asked him, slipping her arm through the crook of his as they went. ‘To do what?’

‘To see if any of it’s worth a damn. To try raising a familiar, or crossing into the Dominions?’

He looked at her with genuine astonishment.

‘That’s against every precept of the Society,’ he said.

‘That’s not what I asked,’ she replied, almost curtly. ‘I said: have you ever been tempted?’

‘My father taught me that any dealings with the Imajica would put my soul in jeopardy.’

‘Mine said the same. But I think he regretted not finding out for himself at the end. I mean, if there’s no truth in it, then there’s no harm.’

‘Oh I believe there’s truth in it,’ Bloxham said.