Читать книгу Imajica - Clive Barker, Clive Barker - Страница 21

‘So they’ve summoned me, have they?’ Oscar said, as they drove back into London, the traffic thickening with the dusk. ‘Well, let them wait.’

‘You’re not going to tell them you’re here?’

‘In my time, not in theirs. This is a mess, Dowdy. A wretched mess.’

‘You told me to help Estabrook if he needed it.’

‘Helping him hire an assassin isn’t what I had in mind.’

‘Chant was very discreet.’

‘Death makes you that way, I find. You really have made a pig’s ear of the whole thing.’

‘I protest,’ said Dowd. ‘What else was I supposed to do? You knew he wanted the woman dead, and you washed your hands of it.’

‘All true,’ said Godolphin. ‘She is dead, I assume?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve been scouring the papers, and there’s no mention.’

‘So why did you have Chant killed?’

Here Dowd was more cautious in his account. If he said too little, Godolphin would suspect him of concealment. Too much, and the larger picture might become apparent. The longer his employer stayed in ignorance of the scale of the stakes, the better. He proffered two explanations, both ready and waiting:

‘For one thing, the man was more unreliable than I‘d thought. Drunk and maudlin half the time. And I think he knew more than was good for either you or your brother. He might have ended up finding out about your travels.’

‘Instead it’s the Society that’s suspicious.’

‘It’s unfortunate the way these things turn out.’

‘Unfortunate, my arse. It’s a total balls-up is what it is.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘I know you are, Dowdy,’ Oscar said. ‘The point is, where do we find a scapegoat?’

‘Your brother?’

‘Perhaps,’ Godolphin replied, cannily concealing the degree to which this suggestion found favour.

‘When should I tell them that you’ve come back?’ Dowd asked.

‘When I’ve made up a lie I can believe in,’ came the reply.

Back in the house in Regent’s Park Road, Oscar took some time to study the newspaper reports of Chant’s death before retiring to his treasure house on the third floor with both his new artifacts and a good deal to think about. There was a sizeable part of him that wanted to exit this Dominion once and for all. Take himself off to Yzordderrex and set up business with Peccable; marry Hoi-Polloi despite her crossed eyes; have a litter of kids and retire to the Hills of the Conscious Cloud, in the Third, and raise parrots. But he knew he’d yearn for England sooner or later, and a yearning man could be cruel. He’d end up beating his wife, bullying his kids and eating the parrots. So, given that he’d always have to keep a foot in England, if only during the cricket season, and given that as long as he kept a presence here he would be answerable to the Society, he had to face them.

He locked the door of his treasure room, sat down amongst his collection, and waited for inspiration. The shelves around him, which were built to the ceiling, were bowed beneath the weight of his trove. Here were items gathered from the edge of the Second Dominion to the limits of the Fourth. He had only to pick one of them up to be transported back to the time and place of its acquisition. The Statue of the Etook Ha’chiit he’d bartered for in a little town called Slew, which was now. regrettably, a blasted spot, its citizens the victims of a purge visited upon them for the crime of a song, written in the dialect of their community, suggesting that the Autarch of Yzordderrex lacked testicles.

Another of his treasures, the seventh volume of Gaud Maybellome’s Encyclopaedia of Heavenly Signs, originally written in the language of Third Dominion academics but widely translated for the delectation of the proletariat, he’d bought from a woman in the city of Jassick, who’d approached him in a gaming room where he was attempting to explain cricket to a group of the locals, and said she recognized him from stories her husband (who was in the Autarch’s army in Yzordderrex) had told.

‘You’re the English male,’ she’d said, which didn’t seem worth denying.

Then she’d shown him the book: a very rare volume indeed. He’d never ceased to find fascination within its pages, for it was Maybellome’s intention to make an encyclopaedia listing all the flora, fauna, languages, sciences, ideas, moral perspectives - in short, anything that occurred to her - that had found their way from the Fifth Dominion, the Place of the Succulent Rock, through to the other worlds. It was a Herculean task, and she’d died just as she was beginning the nineteenth volume, with no end in sight, but even the one book in Godolphin’s possession was enough to guarantee that he would search for the others until his dying day. It was a bizarre, almost surreal volume. Even if only half the entries were true, or nearly true, Earth had influenced just about every aspect of the worlds from which it was divided. Fauna, for instance. There were countless animals listed in the volume which Maybellome claimed to be invaders from the other world. Some clearly were: the zebra, the crocodile, the dog. Others were a mixture of genetic strands, part terrestrial, part non. But many of these species (pictured in the book like fugitives from a mediaeval bestiary) were so outlandish he doubted their very existence. Here, for instance, were hand-sized wolves, with the wings of canaries. Here was an elephant that lived in an enormous conch. Here was a literate worm that wrote omens with its thread-fine, half-mile body. Wonderment upon wonderment. Godolphin only had to pick up the encyclopaedia and he was ready to put on his boots and set off for the Dominions again.

What was self-evident from even a casual perusal of the book was how extensively the unreconciled Dominion had influenced the others. The languages of earth - English, Italian, Hindustani and Chinese particularly - were known in some variation everywhere, though it seemed the Autarch - who had come to power in the confusion following the failed Reconciliation -favoured English, which was the preferred linguistic currency almost everywhere now. To name a child with an English word was thought particularly propitious, though there was little or no consideration given to what the word actually meant. Hence Hoi-Polloi, for instance; this one of the less strange namings amongst the thousands Godolphin had encountered.

He flattered himself that he was in some small part responsible for such blissful bizarrities, given that over the years he’d brought all manner of influences through from the Succulent Rock. There was always a hunger for newspapers and magazines (usually preferred to books) and he’d heard of baptizers in Patashoqua who named children by stabbing a copy of the London Times with a pin and bequeathing the first three words they pricked upon the infant, however unmusical the combination. But he was not the only influence. He hadn’t brought the crocodile, or the zebra, or the dog (though he would lay claim to the parrot). No, there had always been routes through from Earth into the Dominions, other than that at the Retreat. Some, no doubt, had been opened by Maestros and esoterics, in all manner of cultures, for the express purpose of their passing to and fro between worlds. Others were conceivably opened by accident, and perhaps remained open, marking the sites as haunted or sacred, shunned or obsessively protected. Yet others, these in the smallest number, had been created by the sciences of the other Dominions, as a means of gaining access to the heaven of the Succulent Rock.

In such a place, this near the walls of the Iahmandhas in the Third Dominion, Godolphin had acquired his most sacred possession: a Boston Bowl, complete with its forty-one coloured stones. Though he’d never used it, the Bowl was reputedly the most accurate prophetic tool known in the worlds, and now - sitting amid his treasures, with a sense growing in him that events on Earth in the last few days were leading to some matter of moment - he brought the Bowl down from its place on the highest shelf, unwrapped it, and set it on the table. Then he took the stones from their pouch and laid them at the bottom of the Bowl. Truth to tell, the arrangement didn’t look particularly promising: the Bowl resembled something for kitchen use, plain fired ceramic, large enough to whip eggs for a couple of soufflés. The stones were more colourful, varying in size and shape from tiny, flat pebbles to perfect spheres the size of an eyeball.

Having set them out, Godolphin had second thoughts. Did he even believe in prophecy? And if he did, was it wise to know the future? Probably not. Death was bound to be in there somewhere, sooner or later. Only Maestros and deities lived forever, and a man might sour the balance of his span knowing when it was going to end. But then, suppose he found in this Bowl some indication as to how the Society might be handled? That would be no small weight off his shoulders.

‘Be brave,’ he told himself, and laid the middle finger of each hand upon the rim, as Peccable, who’d once owned such a Bowl and had it smashed by his wife in a domestic row, had instructed.

Nothing happened at first, but Peccable had warned him the Bowls usually took some time to start from cold. He waited, and waited. The first sight of activation was a rattling from the bottom of the Bowl as the stones began to move against each other, the second, a distinctly acidic odour rising to jab at his sinuses, the third, and most startling, the sudden ricocheting of one pebble, then two, then a dozen, across the Bowl and back, several skipping higher than the rim. Their ambition increased by the movement, until all forty-one were in violent motion, so violent that the Bowl began to move across the table, and Oscar had to take a firm hold of it to keep it from turning over. The stones struck his fingers and knuckles with stinging force, but the pain made sweeter the success that now followed, as the speed and motion of the multifarious shapes and colours began to describe images in the air above the Bowl.

Like all prophecy, the signs were in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps another witness would have seen quite different forms in the blur. But what Godolphin saw seemed quite plain to him. The Retreat for one, half-hidden in the copse. Then himself, standing in the middle of the mosaic, either coming back from Yzordderrex or preparing to depart. The images lingered for only a brief time before changing, the Retreat demolished in the storm of stones and a new structure raised in the whirl: the Tower of the Tabula Rasa. He fixed his eyes on the prophecy with fresh deliberation, denying himself the comfort of blinking to be certain he missed nothing. The Tower as seen from the street gave way to its interior. Here they were, the wise ones, sitting around the table contemplating their divine duty. They were navel-defluffers and snot-rollers to a man. Not one of them would be capable of surviving an hour in the alleyways of East Yzordderrex, he thought, down by the harbour where even the cats had pimps. Now he saw himself step into the picture, and something he was doing or saying made the men and women before him jump from their seats, even Lionel.

‘What’s this?’ Oscar murmured.

They had wild expressions on their faces, every one. Were they laughing? What had he done? Cracked a joke? Passed wind? He studied the prophecy more closely. No, it wasn’t humour on their faces. It was horror.

‘Sir?’

Dowd’s voice from outside the door broke his concentration. He looked away from the Bowl for a few seconds to snap: ‘Go away.’

But Dowd had urgent news. ‘McGann’s on the telephone,’ he said.

‘Tell him you don’t know where I am,’ Oscar snorted, returning his gaze to the Bowl.

Something terrible had happened in the time between his looking away and looking back. The horror remained on their faces, but for some reason he’d disappeared from the scene. Had they dispatched him summarily? God, was he dead on the floor? Maybe. There was something glistening on the table, like spilled blood.

‘Sir!’

‘Fuck off, Dowdy.’

‘They know you’re here, sir.’

They knew; they knew. The house was being watched, and they knew.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell him I’ll be down in a moment.’

‘What did you say, sir?’

Oscar raised his voice over the din of the stones, looking away again, this time more willingly: ‘Get his whereabouts. I’ll call him back.’

Again, he returned his gaze to the Bowl, but his concentration had faltered, and he could no longer interpret the images concealed in the motion of the stones. Except for one. As the speed of the display slowed he seemed to catch - oh so fleetingly - a woman’s face in the mêlée. His replacement at the Society’s table, perhaps; or his dispatcher.