Imajica. Clive Barker

they were, the two she’d seen. In his passion to capture some impression of Pie’oh’pah, he had painted the assassin stepping from shadow (or back into it), a stream of darkness running down the middle of his face and torso. It divided the figure from top to bottom, and its outer edges, ragged and lush, described the reciprocative forms of profiles, etched in white from the halves of what he’d intended to be a single face. They stared at each other like lovers, eyes looking forward in the Egyptian manner, the backs of their heads folded into shadow. The question was: who were these two? What had he been trying to express setting these faces thus, nose to nose?

      He interrogated the painting for several minutes after she’d gone, preparing as he did so to attack the canvas again. But when it came to doing so, he lacked the strength. His hands were trembling, his palms clammy; his eyes could only focus upon the image indifferently well. He retreated from the picture, afraid to touch it in this weakened state for fear he undo what little he’d already achieved. A painting could escape so quickly. A few inept strokes and a likeness (to a face, to another painter’s work) could flee the canvas and never be recaptured. Better to leave it alone tonight. To rest, and hope he was strong tomorrow.

      He dreamed of sickness. Of lying in his bed, naked beneath a thin white sheet, shivering so hard his teeth chattered. Snow fell from the ceiling intermittently, and didn’t melt when it touched his flesh, because he was colder than the snow. There were visitors in his sickroom, and he tried to tell them how cold he was, but he had no power in his voice, and the words came out as gasps, as though he were struggling for his last breath. He began to fear that this dream condition was fatal; that snow and breathlessness would bury him. He had to act. Rise up from the hard bed and prove these mourners premature.

      With painful slowness, he moved his hands to the edge of the mattress in the hope of pulling himself upright, but the sheets were slick with his final sweat, and he couldn’t get a firm hold. Fear turned to panic, despair bringing on a new round of gasps, more desperate than the last. He struggled to make his situation plain, but the door of his sickroom stood wide now and all the mourners had disappeared through it. He could hear them in another room, talking and laughing. There was a patch of sun on the threshold, he saw. Next door it was summer. Here, there was only the heart-stopping cold, taking a firmer grip on him by the moment. He gave up attempting Lazarus, and instead let his palms lie flat on the sheets, and his eyes flutter closed. The sound of voices from the next room softened to a murmur. The noise of his heart dwindled. New sounds rose to replace it, however. A wind was gusting outside, and branches thrashed at the windows. Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation. He opened his eyes again. The bed had gone, so had the snow. Lightning threw into silhouette a man who stood watching the storm.

      ‘Can you make me forget?’ Gentle heard himself saying. ‘Do you have the trick of that?’

      ‘Of course,’ came the soft reply. ‘But you don’t want it.’

      ‘No, what I want’s death, but I’m too afraid of that tonight. That’s the real sickness: fear of death. But I can live with forgetfulness, give me that.’

      ‘For how long?’

      ‘Until the end of the world.’

      Another lightning flash burned out the figure in front of him, and then the whole scene. Gone; forgotten. Gentle blinked the after-image of window and silhouette out of his eyes, and in doing so passed between sleep and waking.

      The room was cold, but not as icy as his deathbed. He sat upright, staring first at his unclean hands, then at the window. It was still night, but he could hear the sound of vehicles on the Edgware Road, their murmur reassuring. Already - distracted by sound and sight - the nightmare was fading. He was happy to lose it.

      He shrugged off the bedclothes and went to the kitchen to find himself something to drink. There was a carton of milk in the refrigerator. He downed its contents - though the milk was ready to turn - aware that his churned system would probably reject it in short order. Quenched, he wiped his mouth and chin and went through to look at the painting again, but the intensity of the dream from which he’d just woken made a mockery of his efforts. He would not conjure the assassin by this crude magic. He could paint a dozen canvases, a hundred, and still not capture the ambiguities of Pie’oh’pah. He belched, bringing the taste of bad milk back up into his mouth. What was he to do? Lock himself away, and let this sickness in him - put there by the sight of the assassin - consume him? Or bathe, sweeten himself, and go out to find some faces to put between him and the memory? Both vain endeavours. Which left a third, distressing route. To find Pie’oh’pah in the flesh: to face him, question him, have his fill of him, until every ambiguity was scoured away.

      He went on staring at the painting while he turned this option over. What would it take to find the assassin? An interrogation of Estabrook, for one. That wouldn’t be too onerous a duty. Then a search of the city, to find the place Estabrook had claimed he couldn’t recall. Again, no great hardship. Better than sour milk and sourer dreams.

      Knowing that in the light of morning he might lose his present clarity of mind, and it was best to close off at least one route of retreat, he went to the paints, and squeezed on to his palm a fat worm of cadmium yellow, and worked it into the still wet canvas. It obliterated the lovers immediately, but he wasn’t satisfied until he’d covered the canvas from edge to edge. The colour fought for its brilliance, but it soon deteriorated, tainted by the darkness it was trying to obscure. By the time he’d finished, it was as if his attempt to capture Pie’oh’pah had never been made.

      Satisfied, he stood back and belched again. The nausea had gone from him. He felt strangely buoyant. Maybe sour milk suited him.

      2

      Pie’oh’pah sat on the step of his trailer, and stared up at the night sky. In their beds behind him, his adopted wife and children slept. In the heavens above him, the stars were burning behind a blanket of sodium-tinted cloud. He had seldom felt more alone in his long life than now. Since returning from New York he had been in a state of constant anticipation. Something was going to happen to him and his world, but he didn’t know what. His ignorance pained him, not simply because he was helpless in the face of this imminent event, but because his inability to grasp its nature was testament to how his skills had deteriorated. The days when he could read futurities off the air had gone. He was more and more a prisoner of the here and now. That here, the body he occupied, was also less than its former glory. It was so long since he’d corresponded the way he had with Gentle, taking the will of another as the gospel of his flesh, that he’d almost lost the trick of it. But Gentle’s desire had been potent enough to remind him, and his body still reverberated with echoes of their time together. Though it had ended badly he didn’t regret snatching those minutes. Another such encounter might never come.

      He wandered from his trailer towards the perimeter of the encampment. The first light of dawn was beginning to eat at the murk. One of the camp mongrels, back from a night of adventuring, squeezed between two sheets of corrugated iron and came wagging to his side. He stroked the dog’s snout, and tickled behind its battle-ravaged ears, wishing he could find his way back to his home and master so easily.

      3

      It was the oft-stated belief of Esmond Bloom Godolphin, the late father of Oscar and Charles, that a man could never have too many bolt-holes, and of E.B.G.’s countless saws this was the only one Oscar had been significantly influenced by. He had not less than four places of occupation in London. The house in Primrose Hill was his chief residence, but there was also a pied à terre in Maida Vale, a smallish flat in Notting Hill, and the location he was presently occupying: a windowless warehouse concealed in a maze of derelict and near-derelict properties near the river.

      It was not a place he was particularly happy to frequent, especially not on the day after Christmas, but over the years it had proved a secure haven for Dowd’s two associates, the voiders, and it now served as a Chapel of Rest for Dowd himself. His naked corpse lay beneath a shroud on the cold concrete, with aromatic herbs, picked and dried