Imajica. Clive Barker

the old had offered. She closed the curtains in the hope that her presence would go undetected, lit some candles, put on a flute concerto, and started to prepare something light for supper. As she washed her hands, she found that her fingers and palms had taken on a light dusting of colour from the stone. She’d caught herself toying with it several times during the afternoon, and pocketed it, only to find minutes later that it was once again in her hands. Why the colour it had left behind had escaped her until now she didn’t know. She rubbed her hands briskly beneath the tap to wash the dust off, but when she came to dry them found the colour was actually brighter. She went into the bathroom to study the phenomenon under a more intense light. It wasn’t, as she’d first thought, dust. The pigment seemed to be in her skin, like a henna stain. Nor was it confined to her palms. It had spread to her wrists, where she was sure her flesh hadn’t come in contact with the stone. She took off her blouse, and to her shock discovered there were irregular patches of colour at her elbows as well. She started talking to herself, which she always did when she was confounded by something.

      ‘What the hell is this? I’m turning blue? This is ridiculous.’

      Ridiculous maybe, but none too funny. There was a crawl of panic in her stomach. Had she caught some disease from the stone? Was that why Estabrook had wrapped it up so carefully and hidden it away?

      She turned on the shower, and stripped. There were no further stains on her body that she could find, which was some small comfort. With the water seething hot she stepped into the bath, working up a lather and rubbing at the colour. The combination of heat and the panic in her belly was dizzying her, and halfway through scrubbing at her skin she feared she was going to faint and had to step out of the bath again, reaching to open the bathroom door, and let in some cooler air. Her slick hand slid on the door-knob however, and cursing she reeled round for a towel to wipe the soap off. As she did so she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her neck was blue. The skin around her eyes was blue. Her brow was blue, all the way up into her hairline. She backed away from this grotesquerie, flattening herself against the steam-wetted tiles.

      This isn’t real,’ she said aloud.

      She reached for the handle a second time, and wrenched at it with sufficient force to open the door. The cold brought gooseflesh from head to foot, but she was glad of the chill. Perhaps it would slap this self-deceit out of her. Shuddering with cold she fled the reflection, heading back into the candlelit haven of the living room. There in the middle of the coffee-table lay the piece of blue stone, its eye looking back at her. She didn’t even remember taking it out of her pocket, much less setting it on the table in this studied fashion, surrounded by candles. Its presence made her hang back at the door. She was suddenly superstitious of it, as though its gaze had a basilisk’s power, and could turn her to similar stuff. If that was its business she was too late to undo it. Every time she’d turned the stone over she’d met its glance. Made bold by fatalism, she went to the table and picked the stone up, not giving it time to obsess her again but flinging it against the wall with all the power she possessed.

      As it flew from her hand it granted her the luxury of knowing her error. It had taken possession of the room in her absence; had become more real than the hand that had thrown it, or the wall it was about to strike. Time was its plaything, and place its toy, and in seeking its destruction she would unknit both.

      It was too late to undo the error now. The stone struck the wall with a loud hard sound, and in that moment she was thrown out of herself, as surely as if somebody had reached into her head, plucked out her consciousness and pitched it through the window. Her body remained in the room she’d left, irrelevant to the journey she was about to undertake. All she had of its senses was sight. That was enough. She floated out over the bleak street, shining wet in the lamplight, towards the step of the house opposite hers. A quartet of party-goers - three young men with a tipsy girl in their midst - was waiting there, one of the youths rapping impatiently on the door. While they waited, the burliest of the trio pressed kisses on the girl, kneading her breasts covertly as he did so. Jude caught glimpses of the discomfort that surfaced between the girl’s giggles; saw her hands make vain little fists when her suitor pushed his tongue against her lips, then saw her open her mouth to him, more in resignation than lust. As the door opened, and the four stumbled into the din of celebration, she moved away, rising over the rooftops as she flew, and dropping down again to catch glimpses of other dramas unfolding in the houses she passed.

      They were all, like the stone that had sent her on this mission, fragments; slivers of dramas she could only guess at. A woman in an upper room, staring down at a dress laid on a stripped bed; another at a window, tears falling from beneath her closed lids as she swayed to music Jude couldn’t hear; yet another rising from a table of glittering guests, sickened by something. None of them women she knew, but all quite familiar. Even in her short remembered life she’d felt like ail of them at some time or other: forsaken; powerless; yearning. She began to see the scheme here. She was going from glimpse to glimpse as if to moments of her life, meeting her reflection in women of every class and kind.

      In a dark street behind King’s Cross she saw a woman servicing a man in the front seat of his car, bending to take his hard pink prick between lips the colour of menstrual blood. She’d done that too, or its like, because she’d wanted to be loved. And the woman driving past, seeing the whores on parade and righteously sickened by them: that was her. And the beauty taunting her lover out in the rain, and the virago applauding drunkenly above, she’d been in those lives just as surely, or they in hers.

      Her journey was nearing its end. She’d reached a bridge from which there would perhaps have been a panoramic view of the city, but the rain in this region was heavier than it had been in Notting Hill, and the distance was shrouded. Her mind didn’t linger, but moved on through the downpour - unchilled, unwetted - towards a lightless tower that lay all but concealed behind a row of trees. Her speed had dropped, and she wove between the foliage like a drunken bird, dropping down to the ground, and sinking through it into a sodden and utter darkness.

      There was a momentary terror that she was going to be buried alive in this place, then the darkness gave way to light, and she was dropping through the roof of some kind of cellar, its walls lined not with wine-racks but with shelves. Lights hung along the passageways, but the air here was still dense, not with dust but with something she only understood vaguely. There was sanctity here, and there was power. She had felt nothing like it in her life; not in St Peter’s, or Chartres, or the Duomo. It made her want to be flesh again, instead of a roving mind. To walk here. To touch the books, the brick; to smell the air. Dusty it would be, but such dust; every mote wise as a planet from floating in this holy space.

      The motion of a shadow caught her eye, and she moved towards it along the passageway, wondering as she went what volumes these were, stacked on every side. The shadow up ahead, which she’d taken to be that of one person, was of two, erotically entangled. The woman had her back to the books, her arms grasping the shelf above her head. Her mate, his trousers around his ankles, was pressed against her, making short gasps to accompany the jabbing of his hips. Both had their eyes closed, the sight of each other was no great aphrodisiac. Was this coupling what she’d come here to see? God knows, there was nothing in their labours to either arouse or educate her. Surely the blue eye hadn’t driven her across the city gathering tales of womanhood just to witness this joyless intercourse. There had to be something here she wasn’t comprehending. Something hidden in their exchange, perhaps? But no. It was only gasps. In the books that rocked on the shelves behind them? Perhaps.

      She drifted closer to scrutinize the titles, but her gaze ran beyond spines to the wall against which they stood. The bricks were the same plain stuff as all along the passages. The mortar between had a stain in it she recognized however: an unmistakable blue. Excited now, she drove her mind on, past the lovers and the books, and through the brick. It was dark on the other side, darker even than the ground she’d dropped through to enter this secret place. Nor was it simply a darkness made of light’s absence, but of despair and sorrow. Her instinct was to retreat from it, but there was another presence here that made her linger; a form barely distinguishable from the darkness, lying on the ground in this squalid cell. It was bound - almost cocooned - its face completely covered. The binding was as fine as thread, and had been wound around the body with