The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker

Nothing real that isn’t dreamed first. Me? I never wanted my body except as a vehicle. Never really wanted anything at all, except to be sky. But you, Jaffe. You! Your mind’s full of shit. Think of that. Think what the Nuncio’s going to magnify. I beg you –’

      The entreaty, breathed in his skull, made Jaffe halt a moment, and look back at the portrait. It had risen from its chair, though by the expression on Fletcher’s face it was a torment to tear himself away from the view.

      ‘I beg you,’ he said again. ‘Don’t let it use you.’

      Fletcher extended a hand towards Jaffe’s shoulder, but he retreated out of touching range, stepping through into the laboratory. His eyes almost instantly came to rest on the bench and the two phials left in the rack, their contents boiling up against the glass.

      ‘Beautiful,’ Jaffe said, and stepped towards them, the Nuncio leaping up in the phials at his approach, like a dog wanting to lick its master’s face. Its fawning made a lie of Fletcher’s fears. He, Randolph Jaffe, was the user in this exchange. The Nuncio, the used.

      In his head, Fletcher continued to issue his warning:

      ‘Every cruelty in you, Jaffe, every fear, every stupidity, every cowardice. All making you over. Are you prepared for that? I don’t think so. It’ll show you too much.’

      ‘No such thing as too much,’ Jaffe said, tuning the protests out and reaching for the nearest of the phials. The Nuncio couldn’t wait. It broke the glass, its contents jumping to meet his skin. His knowledge (and his terror) were instantaneous, the Nuncio communicating its message on contact. The moment Jaffe realized Fletcher was right was the same moment he became powerless to correct the error.

      The Nuncio had little or no interest in changing the order of his cells. If that happened it would only be as a consequence of a profounder alteration. It viewed his anatomy as a cul-de-sac. What minor improvements it could make in the system were beneath its notice. It wasn’t going to waste time sophisticating finger-joints or taking the kinks out of the lower bowel. It was an evangelist not a beautician. Mind was its target. Mind which used body for its gratification, even when that gratification harmed the vehicle. Mind which was the source of the hunger for transformation and its most ardent and creative agent.

      Jaffe wanted to beg for help, but the Nuncio had already taken control of his cortex, and he was prevented from uttering a word. Prayer was no more plausible. The Nuncio was God. Once in a bottle; now in his body. He couldn’t even die, though his system shook so violently it seemed ready to throw itself apart. The Nuncio forbade everything but its work. Its awesome, perfecting work.

      Its first act was to throw his memory into reverse, shooting him back through his life from the moment it touched him, piercing each event until he struck the waters of his mother’s womb. He was granted a moment of agonizing nostalgia for that place – its calm, its safety – before his life came to drag him out again, and began the return journey, revisiting his little life in Omaha. From the beginning of his conscious life there’d been so much rage. Against the petty and the politic; against the achievers and the seducers, the ones who made the girls and the grades. He felt it all over again, but intensified: like a cancer cell getting fat in the flick of an eye, distorting him. He saw his parents fading away, and him unable to hold on to them, or – when they’d gone – to mourn them, but raged nevertheless, not knowing why they’d lived, or bothered to bring him into the world. He fell in love again, twice. Was rejected again, twice. Nurtured the hurt, decorated the scars, let the rage grow fatter and fatter. And between those notable lows the perpetual grind of jobs that he couldn’t hold, and people who forgot his name day on day, and Christmases coming on Christmases, and only age to mark them. Never getting closer to understanding why he’d been made – why anyone was made, when everything was a cheat and a sham and went to nothing anyway.

      Then, the room at the crossroads, filled with Dead Letters, and suddenly his rage had echoes from coast to coast, wild, bewildered people like him stabbing at their confusion and hoping to see sense when it bled. Some of them had. They’d tumbled mysteries, albeit fleetingly. And he had the evidence. Signs and codes; the Medallion of the Shoal, falling into his hands. A moment later he had his knife buried in Homer’s head, and he was away, with only a parcel of clues, on a trip that had taken him, growing more powerful with every step, to Los Alamos, and the Loop, and finally to the Misión de Santa Catrina.

      And still he didn’t know why he’d been made, but he’d accrued enough in his four decades for the Nuncio to give him a temporary answer. For rage’s sake. For revenge’s sake. For the having of power and the using of power.

      Momentarily he hovered over the scene, and saw himself on the floor below, curled round in a litter of glass, clutching at his skull as though to keep it from splitting. Fletcher moved into view. He seemed to be haranguing the body, but Jaffe couldn’t hear the words. Some self-righteous speech, no doubt, on the frailty of human endeavour. Suddenly he rushed at the body, his arms raised, and brought his fists down upon it. It came apart, like the portrait at the window. Jaffe howled as his dislocated spirit was claimed for the substance on the floor, drawn down into his Nunciate anatomy.

      He opened his eyes and looked up at the man who’d struck off his crust, seeing Fletcher with new comprehension.

      From the beginning they’d been an uneasy partnership, the fundamental principles of which had confounded both. But now Jaffe saw the mechanism clearly. Each was the other’s nemesis. No two entities on earth were so perfectly opposed. Fletcher loving light as only a man in terror of ignorance could; one eye gone from looking at the sun’s face. He was no longer Randolph Jaffe, but the Jaff, the one and only, in love with the dark where his rage had found its sustenance and its expression. The dark where sleep came, and the trip to the dream-sea beyond sleep began. Painful as the Nuncio’s education had been, it was good to be reminded of what he was. More than reminded, magnified through the glass of his own history. Not in the dark now, but of it, capable of using the Art. His hand already itched to do so. And with the itch came a grasp of how to snatch the veil aside and enter Quiddity. He didn’t need ritual. He didn’t need suits or sacrifices. He was an evolved soul. His need could not be denied, and he had need in abundance.

      But in reaching this new self he had accidentally created a force that would, if he didn’t stop here and now, oppose him every step of the way. He got to his feet, not needing to hear a challenge from Fletcher’s lips to know that the enmity between them was perfectly understood. He read the revulsion in the flame that flared behind his enemy’s eye. The genius sauvage, the dope-fiend and Pollyanna Fletcher had been dissolved and reconstructed: joyless, dreamy and bright. Minutes ago he’d been ready to sit by the window, longing to be sky, until longing or death did its work. But not now.

      ‘I see the whole thing,’ he announced, choosing to use his voice-box now that they were equal and opposite. ‘You tempted me to raise you up, so you could steal your way to revelation.’

      ‘And I will,’ the Jaff replied. ‘I’m half way there already.’

      ‘Quiddity won’t open to the likes of you.’

      ‘It’ll have no choice,’ the Jaff replied, ‘I’m inevitable now.’ He raised his hand. Beads of power, like tiny ball-bearings, came sweating from it. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘I’m an Artist.’

      ‘Not ’til you use the Art you’re not.’

      ‘And who’s going to stop me? You?’

      ‘I’ve got no choice. I’m responsible.’

      ‘How? I beat you to a pulp once. I’ll do it again.’

      ‘I’ll raise visions to oppose you.’

      ‘You can try.’ A question came into the Jaff mind as he spoke, which Fletcher had begun to answer before the other had even voiced it.

      ‘Why did I touch your body? I don’t know. It demanded I did. I kept trying to shout it down, but it called.’

      He paused, then said: