The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker

sand.

      Nothing was as it had been.

      He called Fletcher’s name as he stepped through the open door, the anxiety he’d felt coming up the hill now close to fear, not for himself but for the Great Work. He was glad he’d come armed. If Fletcher’s grasp on sanity had finally slipped he might be obliged to coerce the formula for the Nuncio from him. It would not be the first time he’d gone seeking knowledge with a weapon in his pocket. It was sometimes necessary.

      The interior was all ruin; several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instrumentation – coaxed, bullied or seduced from academics who’d given him what he asked for just to get Jaffe’s eyes off them – destroyed; table-tops cleared with the sweep of an arm. The windows had all been thrown open and the Pacific wind blew through the place, hot and salty. Jaffe navigated the wreckage and made his way through to Fletcher’s favourite room, the cell he’d once (high on mescalin) called the plug in the hole in his heart.

      He was there, alive, sitting in his chair in front of the flung window, staring up at the sun: the very act that had blinded him in his right eye. He was dressed in the same shabby shirt and overlarge trousers he always wore; his face presented the same pinched, unshaven profile; the pony-tail of greying hair (his only concession to vanity), was in place. Even his posture – hands at his lap, the body sagging – was one Jaffe had seen innumerable times. And yet there was something subtly wrong with the scene, enough to hold Jaffe at the door, refusing to step into the cell. It was as if Fletcher was too much himself. This was too perfect an image of him: the contemplative, staring at the sun, his every pore and pucker demanding the attention of Jaffe’s aching retina, as if his portrait had been painted by a thousand miniaturists, all of whom had been granted an inch of their subject and with brushes bearing a single hair rendered their portion in nauseating detail. The rest of the room – the walls, the window, even the chair on which Fletcher sat – swam out of focus, unable to compete with the too-thorough reality of this man.

      Jaffe closed his eyes against the portrait. It overloaded his senses. Made him nauseous. In the darkness, he heard Fletcher’s voice, as unmusical as ever.

      ‘Bad news,’ he said, very quietly.

      ‘Why?’ Jaffe said, not opening his eyes. Even with them closed he knew damn well the prodigy was speaking to him without use of tongue or lips.

      ‘Just leave,’ Fletcher said. ‘And yes.’

      ‘Yes what?’

      ‘You’re right. I don’t need my throat any longer.’

      ‘I didn’t say –’

      ‘You don’t need to, Jaffe. I’m in your head. It’s in there, Jaffe. Worse than I thought. You must leave …’

      The volume faded, though the words still came. Jaffe tried to catch them, but most slipped by. Something about do we become sky?, was it? Yes, that’s what he said:

      ‘… do we become sky?’

      ‘What are you talking about?’ Jaffe said.

      ‘Open your eyes,’ Fletcher replied.

      ‘It makes me sick to look at you.’

      ‘The feeling’s mutual. But still … you should open your eyes. See the miracle at work.’

      ‘What miracle?’

      ‘Just look.’

      He did as Fletcher urged. The scene was exactly as it had been when he’d closed them. The wide window; the man sitting before it. The same exactly.

      ‘The Nuncio’s in me,’ Fletcher announced in Jaffe’s head. His face didn’t move at all. Not a twitch of the lips. Not a flicker of an eyelash. Just the same terrible finishedness.

      ‘You mean you tested it on yourself?’ Jaffe said. ‘After all you told me?’

      ‘It changes everything, Jaffe. It’s the whip to the back of the world.’

      ‘You took it! It was supposed to be me!’

      ‘I didn’t take it. It took me. It’s got a life of its own, Jaffe. I wanted to destroy it, but it wouldn’t let me.’

      ‘Why destroy it in the first place? It’s the Great Work.’

      ‘Because it doesn’t operate the way I thought it would. It’s not interested in the flesh, Jaffe, except as an afterthought. It’s the mind it plays with. It takes thought for its inspiration, and runs with that. Makes us what we’d hope to be, or fear we are. Or both. Maybe both.’

      ‘You haven’t changed,’ Jaffe observed. ‘Still sound the same.’

      ‘But I’m talking in your head,’ Fletcher reminded him. ‘Did I ever do that before?’

      ‘So, telepathy’s in the future of the species,’ Jaffe replied. ‘No surprise there. You’ve just accelerated the process. Leap-frogged a few thousand years.’

      ‘Will I be sky?’ Fletcher said again. ‘That’s what I want to be.’

      ‘Then be it,’ Jaffe said. ‘I’ve got more ambition than that.’

      ‘Yes. Yes, you have, more’s the pity. That was why I tried to keep it out of your hands. Stop it using you. But it distracted me. I saw the window open and I couldn’t keep away. The Nuncio made me so dreamy. Made me sit, and wonder: will I … will I be sky?’

      ‘It stopped you cheating me,’ Jaffe said. ‘It wants to be used, that’s all.’

      ‘Mmmm.’

      ‘So where’s the rest? You didn’t take it all.’

      ‘No,’ Fletcher said. The power to deceive had been sluiced from him. ‘But please, don’t …’

      ‘Where?’ Jaffe said, advancing into the room now. ‘You’ve got it on you?’

      He felt myriad tiny brushes against his skin as he stepped forward, as though he’d walked into a dense cloud of invisible gnats. The sensation should have warned him off tackling Fletcher, but he was too eager for the Nuncio to take notice. He put his fingers on the man’s shoulder. Upon contact the figure seemed to fly apart, a cloud of motes – grey, white and red – breaking against him like a pollen storm.

      In his head he heard the genius begin to laugh, not, Jaffe knew, at his expense but at the sheer liberation of shrugging off this skin of dulling dust, which had begun to gather upon him at birth, accruing steadily until all but the brightest hints of brightness were stopped. Now, when the dust blew away, Fletcher was still sitting in the chair as he had been. But now he was incandescent.

      ‘I am too bright?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

      He turned down his flame.

      ‘I want this too!’ Jaffe said. ‘I want it now.’

      ‘I know,’ Fletcher replied. ‘I can taste your need. Messy, Jaffe, messy. You’re dangerous. I don’t think I ever really knew ’til now how dangerous you are. I can see you inside out. Read your past.’ He stopped for a moment, then let out a long, pained moan. ‘You killed a man,’ he said.

      ‘He deserved it.’

      ‘Stood in your way. And this other I’m seeing … Kissoon is it? Did he die too?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘But you’d like to have done it? I can taste hatred in you.’

      ‘Yes, I’d have killed him if I’d had the chance.’ He smiled.

      ‘And me as well, I think,’ Fletcher said. ‘Is that a knife in your pocket,’ he asked, ‘or are you just pleased to see me?’

      ‘I want the Nuncio,’ Jaffe said. ‘I want it, and it wants me …’

      He turned