Imajica

"No."

"That"s close enough," she told Jude. "Who"s then? Which one of them do you belong to?"

"I don"t belong to any of them," Jude said. "They"re all dead."

"Even Roxborough?"

"He"s been gone two hundred years."

At last the eyes stopped flickering, and their stillness, now it came, was more distressing than their motion. She had a gaze that could slice steel.

"Two hundred years," she said. It wasn"t a question, it was an accusation. And it wasn"t Jude she was accusing, it was Dowd. "Why didn"t you come for me?"

"I thought you were dead and gone," he told her.

"Dead? No. That would have been a kindness. I bore His child. I raised it for a time. You knew this."

"How could I? It was none of my business."

"You made made me your business," she said. "The day you took me from my life and gave me to G.o.d. I didn"t ask for that, and I didn"t want it-" me your business," she said. "The day you took me from my life and gave me to G.o.d. I didn"t ask for that, and I didn"t want it-"

"I was just a servant."

"Dog, more like. Who"s got your leash now? This woman?"

"I serve n.o.body."

"Good. Then you can serve me."

"Don"t trust him," Jude said.

"Who, would you prefer I trust?" Celestine replied, not deigning to look at Jude. "You? I don"t think so. You"ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus."

These last words were tinged with such disgust Jude couldn"t stem her retort. "You wouldn"t be awake if I hadn"t found you."

"Consider your freedom to go from this place my thanks," Celestine replied. "You wouldn"t wish to know my company for very long."

Jude didn"t find that difficult to believe. After all the months she"d waited for this meeting, there were no revelations to be had here: only Celestine"s insanity and the ice of her rage.

Dowd, meanwhile, was getting to his feet. As he did so, one of the woman"s ribbons unfurled itself from the shadows and reached towards him. Despite his earlier protests, he made no attempt to avoid it. A suspicious air of humility had come over him. Not only did he put up no resistance, he actually proffered his hands to Celestine for binding, placing them pulse to pulse. She didn"t scorn his offer. The ribbon of her flesh wrapped itself around his wrists, then tightened, tugging at him to haul him up the incline of brick.

"Be careful," Jude warned her. "He"s stronger than he looks."

"It"s all stolen." Celestine replied, "His tricks, his decorums, his power. None of it belongs to him. He"s an actor. Aren"t you?"

As if in acquiescence, Dowd bowed his head. But as he did so he dug his heels into the rubble and refused to be drawn any further. Jude started to voice a second warning; but before it was out of her mouth, his fingers closed around the flesh and pulled hard. Caught unawares, Celestine was dragged against the raw edge of the hole, and before the rest of her filaments could come to her aid Dowd had raised his wrists above his head and casually snapped the flesh that bound them. Celestine let out a howl of pain and retreated into the sanctuary of her cell, trailing the severed ribbon.

Dowd gave her no respite, however, but went in instant pursuit, yelling to her as he shambled up over the heaped rubble, "I"m not your slave! I"m not your dog! And you"re no f.u.c.king G.o.ddess! You"re a wh.o.r.e!"

Then he was gone into the darkness of the cell, roaring. Jude ventured a few steps closer to the hole, but the combatants had retreated into its recesses, and she saw nothing of their struggle. She heard it, however: the hiss of breaths expelled in pain; the sound of bodies pitched against the stone. The walls shook, and books all along the pa.s.sageway were thrown from their shelves, the tide of power s.n.a.t.c.hing loose sheets and pamphlets up into the air like birds in a hurricane, leaving the heavier tomes to thrash on the ground, broken-backed.

And then, suddenly, it was over. The commotion in the cell ceased utterly, and there were several seconds of motionless hush, broken by a moan and the sight of a hand reaching out of the murk to clutch at the broken wall. A moment later Dowd stumbled into view, his other hand clamped to his face. Though the shards he carried were powerful, the flesh they were seated in was weak, and Celestine had exploited that frailty with the efficiency of a warrior. Half his face was missing, stripped to the bone, and his body was more unknitted than the corpse he"d left on the table above: his abdomen gaping, his limbs battered.

He fell as he emerged. Rather than attempting to get to his feet-which she doubted he was capable of doing-he crawled over the rubble like a blind man, his hands feeling out the wreckage ahead. Sobs came from him now and then, and whimpers, but the effort of escape was quickly consuming what little strength he had, and before he reached clear ground his noises gave out. So, a little time after, did he. His arms folded beneath him, and he collapsed, face to the floor, surrounded by twitching books.

Jude watched his body for a count of ten, then moved back towards the cell. As she came within two yards of his body, she saw a motion and froze in her tracks. There was life in him still, though it wasn"t his. The mites were exiting his open mouth, like fleas hastening from a cooling host. They came from his nostrils, too, and from his ears. Without his will to direct them they were probably harmless, but she wasn"t going to test that notion. She stepped as wide of them as she could, taking an indirect route up over the rubble to the threshold of Celestine"s asylum.

The shadows were much thickened by the dust that danced in the air, an aftermath of the forces that had been unleashed inside. But Celestine was visible, lying crookedly against the far wall. He"d done her harm, no doubt of that. Her pale skin was seared and ruptured at thigh, flank, and shoulder. Roxborough"s purgative zeal still had some jurisdiction in his tower, Jude thought. She"d seen three apostates laid low in the s.p.a.ce of an hour one above and two below. Of them all, his prisoner Celestine seemed to have suffered least. Wounded though she was, she still had the will to turn her fierce eyes in Jude"s direction and say: "Have you come to crow?"

"I tried to warn you," Jude said. "I don"t want us to be enemies, Celestine. I want to help you."

"On whose command?"

"On my own. Why"d you a.s.sume everybody"s a slave or a wh.o.r.e or somebody"s d.a.m.n dog?"

"Because that"s the way the world is," she said.

"It"s changed, Celestine."

"What? Are the humans gone then?"

"It"s not human to be a slave."

"What would you know?" the woman said. "I don"t sniff much humanity in you. You"re some kind of pretender, aren"t you? Made by a Maestro."

It would have pained Jude to hear such dismissal from any source, but from this woman, who"d been for so long a beacon of hope and healing, it was the bitterest condemnation. She"d fought so hard to be more than a fake, forged in a manmade womb. But with a few words Celestine had reduced her to a mirage.

"You"re not even natural," she said.

"Nor are you," Jude snapped back.

"But I was once," Celestine said. "And I cling to that."

"Cling all you like, it won"t change the facts. No natural woman could have survived in here for two centuries."

"I had my revenge to nourish me."

"On Roxborough?"

"On them all, all except one."

"Who?"

"The Maestro... Sartori."

"You knew him?"

"Too little," Celestine said.

There was a weight of sorrow here Jude didn"t comprehend, but she had the means to ameliorate it on her tongue, and for all Celestine"s cruelties Jude wasn"t about to withhold the news.

"Sartori isn"t dead," she said.

Celestine had turned her face to the wall, but now looked back at Jude. "Not dead?"

"I"ll find him for you if you want," Jude said.

"You"d do that?"

"Yes."

"Are you his mistress?"

"Not exactly."

"Where is he? Is he near?"

"I don"t know where he is. Somewhere in the city."

"Yes. Fetch him. Please, fetch him." She hauled herself up the wall. "He doesn"t know my name, but I know him."

"So who shall I tell him you are?"

"Ask him... ask him if he remembers Nisi Nirvana."

"Who?"

"Just tell him."

"Nisi Nirvana?"

"That"s right."

Jude stood up and returned to the hole in the wall, but as she was about to step out Celestine recalled her.

"What"s your name?" she asked.

"Judith."

"Well, Judith, not only do you stink of coitus, but you have in your hand some piece of flesh which you haven"t given up clutching. Whatever it is, let it go."

Appalled, Jude looked down at her hand. The curiosity was still in her possession, half-hanging from her fist. She pitched it away, into the dust.

"Do you wonder I took you for a wh.o.r.e?" Celestine remarked.

"Then we"ve both made mistakes," Jude replied, looking back at her. "I thought you were my salvation."

"Yours was the greater error," Celestine replied.

Jude didn"t grace this last piece of spite with a reply but headed out of the cell. The mites that had exited Dowd"s body were still crawling around aimlessly, looking for a new bolt-hole, but the flesh they"d vacated had upped and gone. She wasn"t altogether surprised. Dowd was an actor to his core. He would postpone his farewell scene as long as possible, in the hope that he"d be at center stage when the final curtain fell. A hopeless ambition, given the fame of his fellow players, and one Jude wasn"t foolish enough to share. The more she learned about the drama unfolding around her, with its roots in the tale of Christos the Reconciler, the more resigned she was to having little or no role in it. Like the Fourth Magi, expunged from the Nativity, she wasn"t wanted in the Gospel about to be written; and having seen the pitiful place a king"s testament had come to, she was not about to waste time writing her own.

49

Clem"s duties were done for the night. He"d been out since seven the previous evening, about the same business that took him out every night: the shepherding of those among the city"s homeless too frail or too young to survive long on its streets with only concrete and cardboard for a bed. Midsummer Night was only two days away, and the hours of darkness were short and relatively balmy, but there were other stalkers besides the cold that preyed on the weak-all human-and the work of denying them their quarry took him through the empty hours after midnight and left him, as now, exhausted, but too full of feeling to lay down his head and sleep. He"d seen more human misery in the three months he"d been working with the homeless than in the four decades preceding that. People living in the extremes of deprivation within spitting distance of the city"s most conspicuous symbols of justice, faith, and democracy: without money, without hope, and many (these the saddest) without much left of their sanity. When he returned home after these nightly treks, the hole left in him by Taylor"s pa.s.sing not filled but at least forgotten for a while, it was with expressions of such despair in his head that his own, met in the mirror, seemed almost blithe.

Tonight, however, he lingered in the dark city longer than usual. Once the sun was up he knew he"d have little or no chance of sleeping, but sleep was of little consequence to him at the moment. It was two days since he"d had the visitation that had sent him to Judy"s doorstep with tales of angels, and since then there"d been no further hint of Taylor"s presence. But there were other hints, not in the house but out here in the streets, that powers were abroad which his dear Taylor was just one sweet part of.

He"d had evidence of this only a short time ago. Just after midnight a man called Tolland, apparently much feared among the fragile communities that gathered to sleep under the bridges and in the stations of Westminster, had gone on a rampage in Soho. He"d wounded two alcoholics in a back street, their sole offense to be in his path when his temper flowed. Clem had witnessed none of this, but had arrived after Tolland"s arrest to see if he could coax from the gutter some of those whose beds and belongings had been demolished. None would go with him, however, and in the course of his vain persuasions one of the number, a woman he"d never seen without tears on her face until now, had smiled at him and said he should stay out in the open with them tonight rather than hiding in his bed, because the Lord was coming, and it would be the people on the streets who saw Him first. Had it not been for Taylor"s fleeting reappearance in his life, Clem would have dismissed the woman"s blissful talk, but there were too many imponderables in the air for him to ignore the vaguest signpost to the miraculous. He"d asked the woman what Lord this was that was coming, and she"d replied, quite sensibly, that it didn"t matter. Why should she care what Lord it was, she said, as long as He came?

Now it was an hour before dawn, and he was trudging across Waterloo Bridge because he"d heard the psychopathic Tolland had usually kept to the South Bank and something odd must have happened to drive him across the river. A faint clue, to be sure, but enough to keep Clem walking, though hearth and pillow lay in the opposite direction.

The concrete bunkers of the South Bank complex had been a favorite bete grise bete grise of Taylor"s, their ugliness railed against whenever the subject of contemporary architecture came up in conversation. The darkness presently concealed their drab, stained facades, but it also turned the maze of underpa.s.ses and walkways around them into terrain no bourgeois would tread for fear of his life or his wallet. Recent experience had taught Clem to ignore such anxieties. Warrens such as this usually contained individuals more aggressed against than aggressive, souls whose shouts were defenses against imagined enemies and whose tirades, however terrifying they might seem emerging from shadow, usually dwindled into tears. of Taylor"s, their ugliness railed against whenever the subject of contemporary architecture came up in conversation. The darkness presently concealed their drab, stained facades, but it also turned the maze of underpa.s.ses and walkways around them into terrain no bourgeois would tread for fear of his life or his wallet. Recent experience had taught Clem to ignore such anxieties. Warrens such as this usually contained individuals more aggressed against than aggressive, souls whose shouts were defenses against imagined enemies and whose tirades, however terrifying they might seem emerging from shadow, usually dwindled into tears.

In fact, he"d not heard a whisper from the murk as he descended from the bridge. The cardboard city was visible where its suburbs spilled out into the meager lamplight, but the bulk of it lay under cover of the walkways, out of sight and utterly quiet. He began to suspect that the lunatic Tolland was not the only tenant who"d left his plot to travel north and, stooping to peer into the boxes on the outskirts, had that suspicion confirmed. He headed into shadow, fishing his pencil torch from his pocket to light the way. There was the usual detritus on the ground: spoiled sc.r.a.ps of food, broken bottles, vomit stains. But the boxes, and the beds of newspaper and filthy blankets they contained, were empty. More curious than ever, he wandered on through the rubbish, hoping to find a soul here too weak or too crazy to leave, who could explain this migration. But he pa.s.sed through the city without finding a single occupant, emerging into what the planners of this concrete h.e.l.l had designed as a children"s playground. All that remained of their good intentions were the grimy bones of a slide and a jungle gym. The paving beyond them, however, was covered in fresh color, and advancing to the spot Clem found himself in the middle of a kitsch exhibition: crude chalk copies of movie-star portraits and glamour girls everywhere underfoot.

He ran the beam over the ground, following the trail of images. It led him to a wall, which was also decorated, but by a very different hand. Here was no mere copyist"s work. This image was on such a grand scale Clem had to play his torch beam back and forth across it to grasp its splendor. A group of philanthropic muralists had apparently taken it upon themselves to enliven this underworld, and the result was a dream landscape, its sky green, with streaks of brilliant yellow, the plain beneath orange and red. Set on the sands, a walled city, with fantastical spires.

The torch beam caught a glint off the paint, and Clem approached the wall to discover that the muralists had only recently left off their labors. Patches of the paint were still tacky. Seen at close quarters, the rendering was extremely casual, almost slapdash. Barely more than half a dozen marks had been used to indicate the city and its towers, and only a single snaking stroke to show the highway running from the gates. Moving his beam off the picture to illuminate the way ahead, Clem realized why the muralists had been so haphazard. They had been at work on every available wall, creating a parade of brightly colored images, many of which were far stranger than the landscape with the green sky. To Clem"s left was a man with two cupped hands for a head, lightning jumping between the palms; to his right a family of freaks, with fur on their faces. Farther on was an alpine scene, fantasticated by the addition of several naked women, hovering above the snows; beyond it a skull-strewn veldt, with a distant train belching smoke against a dazzling sky; and beyond that again, an island set in the middle of a sea disturbed by a single wave, in the foam of which a face could be discovered. All were painted with the same pa.s.sionate haste as the first, which fact lent them the urgency of sketches and added to their power. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, or simply the bizarre setting for this exhibition, but Clem found himself oddly moved by the images. There was nothing ingratiating or sentimental about them. They were glimpses into the minds of strangers, and he was exhilarated to find such wonders there.

With his gaze following the journey of pictures, he"d lost all sense of his own direction, but when he turned out his torch to look for the lamplight he saw a small fire burning up ahead, and in lieu of any other beacon he made his way towards it. The fire-makers had occupied a small garden laid amid the concrete. It had perhaps once boasted a rose bed or flowering shrubs; benches, perhaps, dedicated to some dead city father. But now there was only a pitiful lawn, which barely greened the dirt it peered from. Gathered upon it were the tenants of the cardboard city, or some part of their number. Most were asleep, bundled up in their coats and blankets. But five or six were awake, standing around the fire and pa.s.sing a cigarette between them as they talked.

A dreadlocked black squatted on the low wall beside the garden"s gate and, spotting Clem, rose to guard the entrance. Clem didn"t retreat. There was no threat visible in the man"s posture, nor anything but calm in the garden beyond. The sleepers did so quietly, their dreams seemingly kind. And the debaters around the fire spoke in whispers. When they laughed, which they did now and then, it wasn"t the hard, desperate noise he"d heard among these clans, but light.

"Who are you, man?" the black asked him.

"My name"s Clem. I got lost."

"You don"t look like you been sleepin" rough, man."

"I haven"t."

"So why you here?"

"Like I said: I got lost."

The man shrugged. "Waterloo Station"s over in that direction," he said, pointing roughly back the way Clem had come. "But you got a long wait for the first train." He caught Clem"s glance into the garden. "Sorry, man, you can"t come in. If you got a bed, go to it."

Clem didn"t move, however. Something about one of the men at the fire, standing with his back to the gate, rooted him to the spot.

"Who is that, who"s talking now?" he asked the guard.