Imajica. Clive Barker

he said, downing the whisky in one.

      ‘I see nothing to celebrate,’ said Charlotte Feaver, the first to sit down at the table despite what lay upon it. She lit a fresh cigarette, expelling the smoke through pursed lips. ‘Assuming Godolphin’s right, and this thing was attempting to get access to the Society, we have to ask why.’

      ‘Ask away,’ Shales said drily, indicating the corpse. ‘He’s not going to be telling us very much. Which is no doubt convenient for some.’

      ‘How much longer do I have to endure this innuendo?’ Oscar demanded.

      ‘I said we’ve heard enough, Hubert,’ McGann remarked.

      ‘This is a democratic gathering,’ Shales said, rising to challenge McGann’s unspoken authority. ‘If I’ve got something to say - ‘

      ‘You’ve already said it,’ Lionel remarked with well-lubricated vim. ‘Now why don’t you just shut up?’

      ‘The point is, what do we do now?’ Bloxham said. He’d returned to the table, his chin wiped, and was determined to reassert himself following his unmanly display. ‘This is a dangerous time.’

      ‘That’s why they’re here,’ said Alice. ‘They know the anniversary’s coming up and they want to start the whole damn Reconciliation over again.’

      ‘Why try and penetrate the Society?’ Bloxham said.

      ‘To put a spoke in our wheels,’ Lionel said. ‘If they know what we’re planning, they can out-manoeuvre us. By the way, was the tie furiously expensive?’

      Bloxham looked down to see that his silk tie was comprehensively spattered with puke. Casting a rancorous look in Lionel’s direction, he tore it from his neck.

      ‘I don’t see what they could find out from us anyway,’ said Alice Tyrwhitt, in her distracted manner. ‘We don’t even know what the Reconciliation is.’

      ‘Yes we do,’ Shales said. ‘Our ancestors were trying to put Earth into the same orbit as Heaven.’

      ‘Very poetic,’ Charlotte remarked. ‘But what does that mean in concrete terms? Does anybody know?’ There was silence. ‘I thought not. Here we are, sworn to prevent something we don’t even understand.’

      ‘It was an experiment of some kind,’ Bloxham said. ‘And it failed.’

      ‘Were they all insane?’ Alice said.

      ‘Let’s hope not,’ Lionel put in. ‘Insanity usually runs in the family.’

      ‘Well I’m not crazy,’ Alice said. ‘And I’m damn sure my friends are as sane and normal and human as I am. If they were anything else, I’d know it.’

      ‘Godolphin,’ McGann said. ‘You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet.’

      ‘I’m soaking up the wisdom,’ Oscar replied.

      ‘Have you reached any conclusions?’

      ‘Things go in cycles,’ he said, taking his time to reply. He was as certain of his audience as any man could ever hope to be. ‘We’re coming to the end of the millennium. Reason’ll be supplanted by unreason. Detachment by sentiment. I think if I were a fledgling esoteric, with a nose for history, it wouldn’t be difficult to turn up details of what was attempted - the experiment as Bloxham called it - and maybe get it into my head that the time was right to try again.’

      ‘Very plausible,’ said McGann.

      ‘Where would such an adept get the information?’ Shales enquired.

      ‘Self-taught.’

      ‘From what source? We’ve got every tome of any value buried in the ground beneath us.’

      ‘Every one?’ said Godolphin. ‘How can we be so sure?’

      ‘Because there hasn’t been a significant act of magic performed on earth in two centuries,’ was Shales’s reply. ‘The esoterics are powerless; lost. If there’d been the least sign of magical activity we’d know about it.’

      ‘We didn’t know about Godolphin’s little friend,’ Charlotte pointed out, denying Oscar the pleasure of that irony dropping from his own lips.

      ‘Are we even sure the library’s intact?’ Charlotte went on. ‘How do we know books haven’t been stolen?’

      ‘Who by?’ said Bloxham.

      ‘By Dowd, for one. They’ve never been properly catalogued. I know that Leash woman attempted it, but we all know what happened to her.’

      The tale of the Leash woman was one of the Society’s lesser shames: a catalogue of accidents that had ended in tragedy. In essence, the obsessive Clare Leash had taken it upon herself to make a full account of the volumes in the Society’s possession, and had suffered a stroke while doing so. She’d lain for two days on the cellar floor. By the time she was discovered, she was barely alive, and quite without her wits. She’d survived, however, and eleven years later was still a resident in a hospice in Sussex, witless as ever.

      ‘It still shouldn’t be that difficult to find out if the place has been tampered with,’ Charlotte said.

      Bloxham agreed. ‘That should be looked into,’ he said.

      ‘I take it you’re volunteering,’ said McGann.

      ‘And if they didn’t get their information from downstairs,’ Charlotte said, ‘there are other sources. We don’t believe we have every last book dealing with the Imajica in our hands - do we?’

      ‘No, of course not,’ said McGann. ‘But the Society’s broken the back of the tradition over the years. The cults in this country aren’t worth a damn, we all know that. They cobble workings together from whatever they can scrape up. It’s all piecemeal. Senseless. None of them have the wherewithal to conceive of a Reconciliation. Most of them don’t even know what the Imajica is. They’re putting hexes on their bosses at the bank.’

      Godolphin had heard similar speeches for years. Talk of magic in the Western World as a spent force; self-congratulatory accounts of cults that had been infiltrated, and discovered to be groups of pseudo-scientists exchanging arcane theories in a language no two of them agreed upon, or sexual obsessives using the excuse of workings to demand favours they couldn’t seduce from their partners or, most often, crazies in search of some mythology, however ludicrous, to keep them from complete psychosis. But amongst the fakes, obsessives and lunatics, was there perhaps a man who instinctively knew the route to the Imajica? A natural Maestro, born with something in his genes that made him capable of re-inventing the workings of the Reconciliation? Until now the possibility hadn’t occurred to Godolphin - he’d been too preoccupied by the secret that he’d lived with most of his adult life - but it was an intriguing, and disturbing, thought.

      ‘I believe we should take the risk seriously,’ he pronounced. ‘However unlikely we think it is.’

      ‘What risk?’ McGann said.

      ‘That there is a Maestro out there. Somebody who understands our forefathers’ ambition and is going to find his own way of repeating the experiment. Maybe he doesn’t want the books. Maybe he doesn’t need the books. Maybe he’s sitting at home somewhere, even now, working out the problems for himself.’

      ‘So what do we do?’ said Charlotte.

      ‘We purge,’ said Shales. ‘It pains me to say it, but Godolphin’s right. We don’t know what’s going on out there. We keep an eye on things from a distance, and we occasionally arrange to have somebody put under permanent sedation, but we don’t purge. I think we’ve got to begin.’

      ‘How do we go about that?’ Bloxham wanted to know. He had a zealot’s gleam in his dishwater eyes.

      ‘We’ve got our allies.