The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker

broke any hold he had on Raul. Before Fletcher could take a bead on him the boy was away through the door. He still fired wildly, the bullet striking the wall, then he gave chase, firing a second time. But the boy had simian agility in him. He was across the laboratory and out into the sunlight before a third shot could be fired. Out, and away.

      Fletcher threw the gun aside. It was a waste of what little time remained to follow Raul. Better to use those minutes to dispose of the Nuncio. There was precious little of the stuff, but enough to wreak evolutionary havoc in any system that it tainted. He’d plotted against it for days and nights now, working out the safest way to be rid of it. He knew it couldn’t simply be poured away. What might it do if it got into the earth? His best hope, he’d decided – indeed his only hope – was to throw it into the Pacific. There was a pleasing neatness about that. The long climb to his species’ present rung had begun in the ocean, and it was there – in the myriad configurations of certain marine animals – that he’d first observed the urge things had to become something other than themselves. Clues to which the three phials of Nuncio were the solution. Now he’d give that answer back to the element that had inspired it. The Nuncio would literally become drops in the ocean, its powers so diluted as to be negligible.

      He crossed to the bench where the phials still stood in their rack. God in three bottles, milky blue, like a della Francesca sky. There was movement in the distillation, as though it was stirring up its own internal tides. And if it knew he was approaching, did it also know his intention? He had so little idea of what he’d created. Perhaps it could read his mind.

      He stopped in his tracks, still too much the man of science not to be fascinated by this phenomenon. He’d known the liquor was powerful, but that it possessed the talent for self-fermentation it was now displaying – even a primitive propulsion, it seemed; it was climbing the walls of the phials – astonished him. His conviction faltered. Did he really have the right to put this miracle out of the world’s sight? Was its appetite really so unhealthy? All it wanted to do was speed the ascent of things. Make fur of scales. Make flesh of fur. Make spirit, perhaps, of flesh. A pretty thought.

      Then he remembered Randolph Jaffe, of Omaha, Nebraska, sometime butcher and opener of Dead Letters; collector of other people’s secrets. Would such a man use the Nuncio well? In the hands of someone sweet-natured and loving, the Great Work might begin a universal papacy, every living being in touch with the meaning of its Creation. But Jaffe wasn’t loving, nor sweet-natured. He was a thief of revelations, a magician who didn’t care to understand the principles of his craft, only to rise by it.

      Given that fact the question was not did he have the right to dispose of the miracle, but rather, how dare he hesitate?

      He stepped towards the phials, charged with fresh conviction. The Nuncio knew he meant it harm. It responded with a frenzy of activity, climbing the glass walls as best it could, churning against its confines.

      As Fletcher reached out to snatch the rack up, he realized its true intention. It didn’t simply desire escape. It wanted to work its wonders on the very flesh that was plotting its harm.

      It wanted to recreate its Creator.

      The realization came too late to be acted upon. Before he could withdraw his outstretched hand, or shield himself, one of the phials shattered. Fletcher felt the glass cut his palm, and the Nuncio splash against him. He staggered away from it, raising his hand in front of his face. There were several cuts there, but one particularly large, in the middle of his palm, for all the world as though someone had driven a nail through it. The pain made him giddy, but it lasted only a moment, giddiness and pain. Coming after was another sensation entirely. Not even sensation. That was too trivial a description. It was like mainlining on Mozart; a music that bypassed the ears and went straight to the soul. Hearing it, he would never be the same again.

       V

      Randolph had seen the smoke rising from the fires outside the Mission as he rounded the first bend in the long haul up the hill, and had confirmed, in that sight, the suspicion that had been gnawing in him for days: that his hired genius was in revolt. He revved the jeep’s engine, cursing the dirt that slid away in powder clouds behind his wheels, slowing his ascent to a labouring crawl. Until today it had suited both him and Fletcher that the Great Work be accomplished so far from civilization, though it had required a good deal of persuasion on his part to get equipped a laboratory of the sophistication Fletcher had demanded in a setting so remote. But then persuasion was easy nowadays. The trip into the Loop had stoked the fires in Jaffe’s eyes. What the woman in Illinois, whose name he’d never known, had said: You’ve seen something extraordinary, haven’t you? was true now as never before. He’d seen a place out of time, and himself in it, driven beyond sanity by his hunger for the Art. People knew all that though they could never have put words to the thought. They saw it in his look, and either out of fear or awe simply did as he asked.

      But Fletcher had been an exception to that rule from the outset. His peccadilloes, and his desperation, had made him pliable, but the man still had a will of his own. Four times he’d refused Jaffe’s offer to come out of hiding and recommence his experiments, though Jaffe had reminded him on each occasion how difficult it had been to trace the lost genius, and how much he desired that they work together. He’d sweetened each of the four offers by bringing mescalin in modest supply, always promising more, and promising too that any and every facility Fletcher required would be provided if he could only be persuaded back to his studies. Jaffe had known from first reading about Fletcher’s radical theories that here was the way to cheat the system that stood between him and the Art. He didn’t doubt that the route to Quiddity was thronged with tests and trials, designed by high-minded gurus or lunatic shamans like Kissoon to keep what they judged lower-class minds from approaching the Holy of Holies. Nothing new about that. But with Fletcher’s help he could trip the gurus; get to power over their backs. The Great Work would evolve him beyond the condition of any of the self-elected wise men, and the Art would sing in his fingers.

      At first, having set up the laboratory to Fletcher’s specifications, and offered the man some thoughts on the problem he’d gleaned from the Dead Letters, Jaffe left the maestro alone, despatching supplies (starfish, sea urchins; mescalin; an ape) as and when they were requested, but visiting only once a month. On each occasion he’d spent twenty-four hours with Fletcher, drinking and sharing gossip which Jaffe had plucked from the academic grapevine to feed Fletcher’s curiosity. After eleven such visits, sensing that the researches at the Mission were beginning to move towards some conclusion, he began to make the journey more regularly. He was less welcome each time. On one occasion Fletcher had even attempted to keep Jaffe out of the Mission altogether, and there’d been a short, mismatched struggle. Fletcher was no fighter. His stooping, undernourished body was that of a man who’d been bent at his studies since adolescence. Beaten, he’d been obliged to allow access. Inside, Jaffe had found the ape, transformed by Fletcher’s distillation, the Nuncio, into an ugly but undeniably human child. Even then, in the midst of this triumph, there’d been hints of the breakdown which Jaffe couldn’t doubt Fletcher had finally succumbed to. The man had been uneasy about what they’d achieved. But Jaffe had been too damned pleased to take the warning signs seriously. He’d even suggested he try the Nuncio for himself, there and then. Fletcher had counselled against it; suggested several months of further study to be undertaken before Jaffe risk such a step. The Nuncio was still too volatile, he argued. He wanted to examine the way it worked on the boy’s system before any further tests. Suppose it simply proved fatal to the child in a week? Or a day? That argument was enough to cool Jaffe’s ardour for a while. He left Fletcher to undertake the proposed tests, returning on a weekly basis now, becoming more aware of Fletcher’s disintegration with each visit, but assuming the man’s pride in his own masterwork would prevent him trying to undo it.

      Now, as flocks of scorched notes flew across the ground towards him, he cursed his trust. He stepped from the jeep and began to make his way through the scattered fires towards the Mission. There had always been an apocalyptic air about this spot. The earth so dry and sandy it could sustain little more than a few stunted yucca;