The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker

had all he needed of the physical; felt hot and cold, sexy and sexless; fucked and fucker. He wanted none of that again: at least not as Randolph Jaffe. There was another way to be, another place to feel from, where sex and murder and grief and hunger and all of it might be interesting over again, but that would not be until he’d got beyond his present condition; become an Artist; remade the world.

      Just before dawn, with even the roaches sluggish, he felt the invitation.

      A great calm was in him. His heart was slow and steady. His bladder emptied of its own accord, like a baby’s. He was neither too hot nor too cold. Neither too sleepy nor too awake. And at that crossroads – which was not the first, nor would be the last – something tugged on his gut, and summoned him.

      He got up immediately, dressed, took the full bottle of vodka that remained, and went out walking. The invitation didn’t leave his innards. It kept tugging as the cold night lifted and the sun began to rise. He’d come barefoot. His feet bled, but his body wasn’t of great interest to him, and he kept the discomfort at bay with further helpings of vodka. By noon, the last of the drink gone, he was in the middle of the desert, just walking in the direction he was called, barely aware of one foot moving ahead of the other. There were no thoughts in his head now, except the Art and its getting, and even that ambition came and went.

      So, finally, did the desert itself. Somewhere towards evening, he came to a place where even the simplest facts – the ground beneath him, the darkening sky above his head – were in doubt. He wasn’t even sure if he was walking. The absence of everything was pleasant, but it didn’t last. The summons must have pulled him on without his even being aware of its call, because the night he’d left became a sudden day, and he found himself standing – alive, again; Randolph Ernest Jaffe again – in a desert barer even than the one he’d left. It was early morning here. The sun not yet high, but beginning to warm the air, the sky perfectly clear.

      Now he felt pain, and sickness, but the pull in his gut was irresistible. He had to stagger on though his whole body was wreckage. Later, he remembered passing through a town, and seeing a steel tower standing in the middle of the wilderness. But that was only when the journey had ended, at a simple stone hut, the door of which opened to him as the last vestiges of his strength left him, and he fell across its threshold.

       III

      The door was closed when he came round, but his mind wide open. On the other side of a guttering fire sat an old man with doleful, slightly stupid features, like those of a clown who’d worn and wiped off fifty years of slap, his pores enlarged and greasy, his hair, what was left of it, long and grey. He was sitting cross-legged. Occasionally, while Jaffe worked up the energy to speak, the old man raised a buttock and loudly passed wind.

      ‘You found your way through,’ he said, after a time. ‘I thought you were going to die before you made it. A lot of people have. It takes real will.’

      ‘Through to where?’ Jaffe managed to ask.

      ‘We’re in a Loop. A loop in time, encompassing a few minutes. I tied it, as a refuge. It’s the only place I’m safe.’

      ‘Who are you?’

      ‘My name’s Kissoon.’

      ‘Are you one of the Shoal?’

      The face beyond the fire registered surprise.

      ‘You know a great deal.’

      ‘No. Not really. Just bits and pieces.’

      ‘Very few people know about the Shoal.’

      ‘I know of several,’ said Jaffe.

      ‘Really?’ said Kissoon, his tone toughening. ‘I’d like their names.’

      ‘I had letters from them …’ Jaffe said, but faltered when he realized he no longer knew where he’d left them, those precious clues that had brought him through so much hell and heaven.

      ‘Letters from whom?’ Kissoon said.

      ‘People who know … who guess … about the Art.’

      ‘Do they? And what do they say about it?’

      Jaffe shook his head. ‘I’ve not made sense of it yet,’ he said. ‘But I think there’s a sea –’

      ‘There is,’ said Kissoon. ‘And you’d like to know where to find it, and how to be there, and how to have power from it.’

      ‘Yes. I would.’

      ‘And in return for this education?’ Kissoon said. ‘What are you offering?’

      ‘I don’t have anything.’

      ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ Kissoon said, turning his eyes up to the roof of the hut as though he saw something in the smoke that roiled there.

      ‘OK,’ Jaffe said. ‘Whatever I’ve got that you want. You can have it.’

      ‘That sounds fair.’

      ‘I need to know. I want the Art.’

      ‘Of course. Of course.’

      ‘I’ve had all the living I need,’ Jaffe said.

      Kissoon’s eyes came back to rest on him.

      ‘Really? I doubt that.’

      ‘I want to get … I want to get …’ (What? he thought. What do you want?) ‘Explanations,’ he said.

      ‘Well, where to begin?’

      ‘The sea,’ Jaffe said.

      ‘Ah, the sea.’

      ‘Where is it?’

      ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Kissoon replied.

      ‘Yes. I think so.’

      ‘Then you’ve been to Quiddity twice. Once the first night you slept out of the womb. The second occasion the night you lay beside that woman you loved. Or man, was it?’ He laughed. ‘Whichever.’

      ‘Quiddity is the sea.’

      ‘Quiddity is the sea. And in it are islands, called the Ephemeris.’

      ‘I want to go there,’ Jaffe breathed.

      ‘You will. One more time, you will.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘The last night of your life. That’s all we ever get. Three dips in the dream-sea. Any less, and we’d be insane. Any more –’

      ‘And?’

      ‘And we wouldn’t be human.’

      ‘And the Art?’

      ‘Ah, well … opinions differ about that.’

      ‘Do you have it?’

      ‘Have it?’

      ‘This Art. Do you have it? Can you do it? Can you teach me?’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘You’re one of the Shoal,’ Jaffe said. ‘You’ve got to have it, right?’

      ‘One?’ came the reply. ‘I’m the last. I’m the only.’

      ‘So share it with me. I want to be able to change the world.’

      ‘Just a little ambition.’

      ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ Jaffe said, the suspicion growing in him that he was being taken for a fool.

      ‘I’m not going to leave empty-handed, Kissoon. If I get the Art I can enter Quiddity, right? That’s the way it works.’

      ‘Where’d