Clive Barker - Imajica

There was a momentary terror that she was going to be buried alive in this place, then the darkness gave way to light, and she was dropping through the roof of some kind of cellar, its walls lined not with wine-racks but with shelves. Lights hung along the passageways, but the air here was still dense, not with dust but with something she only understood vaguely. There was sanctity here, and there was power. She had felt nothing like it in her life; not in St Peter’s, or Chartres, or the Duomo. It made her want to be flesh again, instead of a roving mind. To walk here. To touch the books, the brick; to smell the air. Dusty it would be, but such dust; every mote wise as a planet from floating in this holy space.

The motion of a shadow caught her eye, and she moved towards it along the passageway, wondering as she went what volumes these were, stacked on every side. The shadow up ahead, which she’d taken to be that of one person, was of two, erotically entangled. The woman had her back to the books, her arms grasping the shelf above her head. Her mate, his trousers around his ankles, was pressed against her, making short gasps to accompany the jabbing of his hips. Both had their eyes closed, the sight of each other was no great aphrodisiac. Was this coupling what she’d come here to see? God knows, there was nothing in their labours to either arouse or educate her. Surely the blue eye hadn’t driven her across the city gathering tales of womanhood just to witness this joyless intercourse. There had to be something here she wasn’t comprehending. Something hidden in their exchange, perhaps? But no. It was only gasps. In the books that rocked on the shelves behind them? Perhaps.

She drifted closer to scrutinize the titles, but her gaze ran beyond spines to the wall against which they stood. The bricks were the same plain stuff as all along the passages. The mortar between had a stain in it she recognized however: an unmistakable blue. Excited now, she drove her mind on, past the lovers and the books, and through the brick. It was dark on the other side, darker even than the ground she’d dropped through to enter this secret place. Nor was it simply a darkness made of light’s absence, but of despair and sorrow. Her instinct was to retreat from it, but there was another presence here that made her linger; a form barely distinguishable from the darkness, lying on the ground in this squalid cell. It was bound - almost cocooned - its face completely covered. The binding was as fine as thread, and had been wound around the body with obsessive care, but there was enough of its shape visible for her to be certain that this like the ensnared spirits at every station along her route, was also a woman.

Her binders had been meticulous. They’d left not so much as a hair or toenail visible. Jude hovered over the body, studying it. They were almost complimentary: like corpse and essence, eternally divided; except that she had flesh to return to. At least she hoped she did; hoped that now she’d completed this bizarre pilgrimage, and had seen the relic in the wall, she’d be allowed to return to her tainted skin. But something still held her here. Not the darkness, not the walls, but some sense of unfinished business. Was a sign of veneration required of her? If so, what? She lacked the hands for genuflection, and the lips for hosannas; she couldn’t kneel, she couldn’t touch the relic. What was there left to do? Unless - God help her -she had to enter the thing.

She knew the instant she’d formed the thought that this was precisely why she’d been brought here. She’d left her living flesh to enter this prisoner of brick, cord and decay, a thrice-bounded carcass from which she might never emerge again. The thought revolted her, but had she come this far only to turn back because this last rite distressed her too much? Even assuming she could defy the forces that had brought her here, and return to the house of her body against their will, wouldn’t she wonder forever what adventure she’d turned her back on? She was no coward; she would enter the relic, and take the consequences.

No sooner thought than done. Her mind sank towards the binding, and slipped between the threads into the body’s maze. She had expected darkness, but there was light here, the forms of the body’s innards delineated by the milk-blue she’d come to know as the colour of this mystery. There was no foulness; no corruption. It was less a charnel house than a cathedral, the source, she now suspected, of the sacredness that permeated this underground. But, like a cathedral, its substance was quite dead. No blood ran in these veins, no heart pumped, no lungs drew breath. She spread her intention through the stilled anatomy, to feel its length and breadth. The dead woman had been large in life, her hips substantial, her breasts heavy. But the binding bit into her ripeness everywhere, perverting the swell and sweep of her. What terrible last moments she must have known, lying blind in this filth, hearing the wall of her mausoleum being built brick by brick. What kind of crime hung on her, Jude wondered, that she’d been condemned to such a death? And who were her executioners, the builders of that wall? Had they sung as they worked, their voices growing dimmer as the brick blotted them out? Or had they been silent, half-ashamed at their cruelty?

There was so much she wished she knew, and none of it answerable. She’d finished her journey as she’d begun it, in fear and confusion. It was time to be gone from the relic, and home. She willed herself to rise out of the dead blue flesh. To her horror, nothing happened. She was bound here, a prisoner within a prisoner. God help her, what had she done? Instructing herself not to panic, she concentrated her mind on the problem, picturing the cell beyond the binding, and the wall she’d passed so effortlessly through, and the lovers, and the passageway that led out to the open sky. But imagining was not enough. She had let her curiosity overtake her, spreading her spirit through the corpse, and now it had claimed that spirit for itself.

A rage began in her, and she let it come. It was as recognizable a part of her as the nose on her face, and she needed all that she was, every particular, to empower her. If she’d had her own body around her it would have been flushing as her heart-beat caught the rhythm of her fury. She even seemed to hear it - the first sound she’d been aware of since leaving the house - the pump at its hectic work. It was not imagined. She felt it in the body around her, a tremor passing through the long-stilled system as her rage ignited it afresh. In the throne-room of its head a sleeping mind woke, and knew it was invaded.

For Jude there was an exquisite moment of shared consciousness, when a mind new to her - yet sweetly familiar - grazed her own. Then she was expelled by its wakefulness. She heard it scream in horror behind her, a sound of mind rather than throat, which went with her as she sped from the cell, out through the wall, past the lovers shaken from their intercourse by falls of dust, out and up, into the rain, and into a night not blue but bitterest black. The din of the woman’s terror accompanied her all the way back to the house, where, to her infinite relief, she found her own body still standing in the candlelit room. She slid into it with ease, and stood in the middle of the room for a minute or two, sobbing, until she began to shudder with cold. She found her dressing-gown, and as she put it on, realized that her wrists and elbows were no longer stained. She went into the bathroom and consulted the mirror. Her face was similarly cleansed.

Still shivering, she returned to the living room to look for the blue stone. There was a substantial hole in the wall where its impact had gouged out the plaster. The stone itself was unharmed, lying on the rug in front of the hearth. She didn’t pick it up. She’d had enough of its delirium for one night. Avoiding its baleful glance as best she could, she threw a cushion over it. Tomorrow she’d plan some way of ridding herself of the thing. Tonight she needed to tell somebody what she’d experienced, before she began to doubt it. Someone a little crazy, who’d not dismiss her account out of hand; someone already half-believing. Gentle, of course.