Клайв Баркер – The Great and Secret Show (страница 5)

It was late afternoon now, and he travelled against the flow of human traffic, entering the Office by the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man’s routine well enough to suspect he’d clocked off at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer somewhere. The furnace was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling antique, called Miller, with whom Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being stone-deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to explain that he was going to be feeding the furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel he’d brought from home, which he immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the Dead Letter Room.

Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe’s chair under a bare bulb, going through the piles around him.

‘So what’s the scam?’ he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.

It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had carved knowledge into his face. He couldn’t pass for a naif any longer. Nor – now it came to it – did he want to.

‘No scam,’ he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man’s puerile suspicions plain. ‘I’m not taking anything you’d want. Or could use.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, asshole,’ Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining down amongst the rest of the litter. ‘I want to know what you’ve been up to down here. ’Sides jerking off.’

Jaffe closed the door. He’d never realized it before, but the reverberations of the furnace carried through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The sacks, the envelopes, the words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer was sitting. And the knife, the short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair on which Homer was sitting. The whole place was moving, ever so slightly, like there was a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be flipped.

Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his way to some throne or other. He didn’t know which and he didn’t know where, but he needed to silence any pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame him, or judge him, or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.

‘I should explain …’ he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, ‘… what the scam really is.’

‘Yeah,’ Homer said, his lip curling. ‘Why don’t you do that?’

‘Well it’s real simple …’

He started to walk towards Homer, and the chair, and the knife beside the chair. The speed of his approach made Homer nervous, but he kept his seat.

‘… I’ve found a secret,’ Jaffe went on.

‘Huh?’

‘You want to know what it is?’

Now Homer stood up, his gaze trembling the way everything else was. Everything except Jaffe. All the tremors had gone out of his hands, his guts and his head. He was steady in an unsteady world.

‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,’ Homer said. ‘But I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ Jaffe said. He didn’t have his eyes on the knife. He didn’t need to. He could sense it. ‘But it’s your job to know, isn’t it?’ Jaffe went on, ‘what’s been going on down here.’

Homer took several steps away from the chair. The loutish gait he liked to affect had gone. He was stumbling, as though the floor was tilting.

‘I’ve been sitting at the centre of the world,’ Jaffe said. ‘This little room … this is where it’s all happening.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Damn right.’

Homer made a nervous little grin. He threw a glance towards the door.

‘You want to go?’ Jaffe said.

‘Yeah.’ He looked at his watch, not seeing it. ‘Got to run. Only came down here –’

‘You’re afraid of me,’ Jaffe said. ‘And you should be. I’m not the man I was.’

‘Is that right?’

‘You said that already.’

Again, Homer looked towards the door. It was five paces away; four if he ran. He’d covered half the distance when Jaffe picked up the knife. He had the door handle clasped when he heard the man approaching behind him.

He glanced round, and the knife came straight at his eye. It wasn’t an accidental stab. It was synchronicity. His eye glinted, the knife glinted. Glints collided, and the next moment he was screaming as he fell back against the door, Randolph following him to claim the letter-opener from the man’s head.

The roar of the furnace got louder. With his back to the sacks Jaffe could feel the envelopes nestling against each other, the words being shaken on the pages, ’til they became a glorious poetry. Blood, it said; like a sea; his thoughts like clots in that sea, dark, congealed, hotter than hot.

He reached for the handle of the knife, and clenched it. Never before in his life had he shed blood; not even squashed a bug, at least intentionally. But now his fist on the hot wet handle seemed wonderful. A prophecy; a proof.

Grinning, he pulled the knife out of Homer’s socket, and before his victim could slide down the door stuck it into Homer’s throat to the hilt. This time he didn’t let it lie. He pulled it out as soon as he’d stopped Homer’s screams, and he stabbed the middle of the man’s chest. There was bone there, and he had to drive hard, but he was suddenly very strong. Homer gagged, and blood came out of his mouth, and from the wound in his throat. Jaffe pulled the knife out. He didn’t stab again. Instead he wiped the blade on his handkerchief and turned from the body to think about his next move. If he tried to hump the sacks of mail to the furnace he risked being discovered, and sublime as he felt, high on the boor-slob’s demise, he was still aware that there was danger in being found out. It would be better to bring the furnace here. After all, fire was a moveable feast. All it required was a light, and Homer had those. He turned back to the slumped corpse and searched in the pockets for a box of matches. Finding one, he pulled it out, and went over to the satchels.

Sadness surprised him as he prepared to put a flame to the dead letters. He’d spent so many weeks here, lost in a kind of delirium, drunk with mysteries. This was goodbye to all that. After this – Homer dead, the letters burnt – he was a fugitive, a man without a history, beckoned by an Art he knew nothing about, but which he wished more than anything to practise.

He began to screw up a few of the pages, to provide some initial fodder for the flame. Once begun, he didn’t doubt that the fire would sustain itself: there was nothing in the room – paper, fabric, flesh – that wasn’t combustible. With three heaps of paper made, he struck a match. The flame was bright, and looking at it he realized how much he hated brightness. The dark was so much more interesting; full of secrets, full of threats. He put the flame to the piles of paper and watched while the fires gained strength. Then he retreated to the door.

Homer was slumped against it, of course, bleeding from three places, and his bulk wasn’t that easy to move, but Jaffe put his back into the task, his shadow thrown up against the wall by the burgeoning bonfire behind him. Even in the half minute it took him to move the corpse aside the heat grew exponentially, so that by the time he glanced back at the room it was ablaze from side to side, the heat stirring up its own wind, which in turn fanned the flames.

It was only when he was clearing out his room of any sign of himself – eradicating every trace of Randolph Ernest Jaffe – that he regretted doing what he’d done. Not the burning – that had been altogether wise – but leaving Homer’s body in the room to be consumed along with the dead letters. He should have taken a more elaborate revenge, he realized. He should have hacked the body into pieces, packaged it up, tongue, eyes, testicles, guts, skin, skull, divided piece from piece – and sent the pieces out into the system with scrawled addresses that made no real sense, so that chance (or synchronicity) was allowed to elect the doorstep on which Homer’s flesh would land. The mailman mailed. He promised himself not to miss such ironic possibilities in future.

The task of clearing his room didn’t take long. He had very few belongings, and most of what he had meant little to him. When it came down to basics, he barely existed. He was the sum of a few dollars, a few photographs, a few clothes. Nothing that couldn’t be put in a small suitcase and still leave room alongside them for a set of encyclopedias.

By midnight, with that same small suitcase in hand, he was on his way out of Omaha, and ready for a journey that might lead in any direction. Gateway to the East, Gateway to the West. He didn’t care which way he went, as long as the route led to the Art.

II

Jaffe had lived a small life. Born within fifty miles of Omaha, he’d been educated there, he’d buried his parents there, he’d courted and failed to persuade to the altar two women of that city. He’d left the state a few times, and even thought (after the second of his failed courtships) of retreating to Orlando, where his sister lived, but she’d persuaded him against it, saying he wouldn’t get on with the people, or the incessant sun. So he’d stayed in Omaha, losing jobs and getting others, never committing himself to anything or anybody for very long, and in turn not being committed to.