Клайв Баркер – Imajica (страница 24)

‘You want proof?’ Oscar yelled, through Dowd’s screams, and the din of shouts around the table. ‘You want proof? Then here it is!’

His bulk put weight behind the blade, driving it first to the right then to the left, encountering no obstruction from rib or breastbone. Nor was there blood; only a fluid the colour of brackish water, that dribbled from the wounds and ran across the table. Dowd’s head thrashed to and fro as this indignity was visited upon him, only once raising his gaze to stare accusingly at Godolphin, who was too busy about this undoing to return the look. Despite protests from all sides he didn’t halt his labours until the body before him had been opened from navel to throat, and Dowd’s thrashings had ceased. The stench from the carcass filled the Chamber; a pungent mixture of sewage and vanilla. It drove two of the witnesses to the door, one of them Bloxham, whose nausea overtook him before he could reach the corridor. But his gaggings and moans didn’t slow Godolphin by a beat. Without hesitation he plunged his arm into the open body and, rummaging there, pulled out a fistful of gut. It was a knotty mass of blue and black tissue - final proof of Dowd’s inhumanity. Triumphant, he threw the evidence down on the table beside the body, then stepped away from his handiwork, chucking the knife into the wound it had opened. The whole performance had taken no more than a minute, but in that time he’d succeeded in turning the Chamber’s table into a fish-market gutter.

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

All protest had been silenced. The only sound was the rhythmical hiss of fluid escaping an opened artery.

Very quietly McGann said:

‘You’re a fucking maniac.’

Oscar reached gingerly into his trouser pocket and teased out a fresh handkerchief. One of poor Dowd’s last tasks had been its pressing. It was immaculate. He shook out its scalpel creases and began to clean his hands.

‘How else was I going to prove my point?’ he said. ‘You drove me to this. Now there’s the evidence, in all its glory. I don’t know what happened to Dowd - my bum-boy I think you called him, Alice - but wherever he is this thing took his place.’

‘How long have you known?’ Charlotte asked.

‘I’ve suspected for the last two weeks. I was here in the city all the time; watching its every move while it - and you - thought I was disporting myself in sunnier climes.’

‘What the bugger is it?’ Lionel wanted to know, prodding a scrap of alien entrail with his finger.

‘God alone knows,’ Godolphin said. ‘Something not of this world, clearly.’

‘What did it want?’ Alice said. ‘That’s more to the point.’

‘At a guess, access to this Chamber, which’ - he looked at those around the table one by one - ‘I gather you granted it, three days ago. I trust none of you was indiscreet.’ Furtive glances were exchanged. ‘Oh, you were,’ he said. ‘That’s a pity. Let’s hope it didn’t have time to communicate any of its findings to its overlords.’

‘What’s done’s done,’ McGann said, ‘and we must all bear some part of the responsibility. Including you, Oscar. You should have shared your suspicions with us.’

‘Would you have believed me?’ Oscar replied. ‘I didn’t believe it myself at first, until I started to notice little changes in Dowd.’

‘Why you?’ Shales said. ‘That’s what I want to know. Why would they target you for this surveillance unless they thought you were more susceptible than the rest of us? Maybe they thought you’d join them. Maybe you have.’

‘As usual, Hubert, you’re too self-righteous to see your own frailties,’ Godolphin replied. ‘How do you know I am the only one they targeted? Could you swear to me every one of your circle’s above suspicion? How closely do you watch your friends? Your family? Any one of them might be a part of this conspiracy.’

It gave Oscar a perverse joy to sow these doubts. He saw them taking root already. Saw faces that half an hour before had been puffed up with their own infallibility deflated by doubt. It was worth the risk he’d taken with these theatrics, just to see them afraid. But Shales wouldn’t leave this bone alone.

‘The fact remains that this thing was in your employ,’ he said.

‘We’ve heard enough, Hubert,’ McGann said softly. ‘This is no time for divisive talk. We’ve got a fight on our hands, and whether we agree with Oscar’s methods or not - and just for the record, I don’t - surely none of us can doubt his integrity.’ He glanced around the table. There were murmurs of accord on all sides. ‘God knows what a creature like this might have been capable of had it realized its ruse had been discovered. Godolphin took a very considerable risk on our behalf.’

‘I agree,’ Lionel said. He’d come round to Oscar’s side of the table and placed a glass of neat malt whisky in the executioner’s freshly wiped fingers. ‘Good man, I say,’ he remarked. ‘I’d have done the same. Drink up.’

Oscar accepted the glass. ‘Salut,’ 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.