Клайв Баркер – The Great and Secret Show (страница 9)

It took persistence to find the man, but Jaffe had that in abundance, and found him in Maine. The genius was much the worse for despair, teetering on the brink of complete mental breakdown. Jaffe was cautious. He didn’t press his suit at first, but instead ingratiated himself by supplying drugs of a quality Fletcher had long since been too poor to afford. Only when he’d gained the addict’s trust did he begin to make oblique reference to Fletcher’s studies. Fletcher was less than lucid on the subject at first, but Jaffe gently fanned the embers of his obsession, and in time the fire flared. Once burning, Fletcher had much to tell. He believed he’d twice come close to isolating what he called the Nuncio, the messenger. But the final processes had always eluded him. Jaffe offered a few observations of his own on the subject, garnered from his readings in the occult. The two of them, he gently suggested, were fellow seekers. Though he, Jaffe, used the vocabulary of the ancients – of alchemists and magicians – and Fletcher the language of science, they had the same desire to nudge evolution’s elbow; to advance the flesh, and perhaps the spirit, by artificial means. Fletcher poured scorn on these observations at the outset, but slowly came to value them, finally accepting Jaffe’s offer of facilities in which to begin his researches afresh. This time, Jaffe promised, Fletcher wouldn’t have to work in an academic hothouse, constantly required to justify his work to hold on to his funding. He guaranteed his dope-fiend genius a place to work that would be well hidden from prying eyes. When the Nuncio had been isolated, and its miracle reproduced, Fletcher Would reappear from the wilderness and put his vilifiers to flight. It was an offer no obsessive could have resisted.

Eleven months later, Richard Wesley Fletcher stood on a granite headland on the Pacific Coast of the Baja and cursed himself for succumbing to Jaffe’s temptations. Behind him, in the Misión de Santa Catrina where he’d laboured for the best part of a year, the Great Work (as Jaffe liked to call it) had been achieved. The Nuncio was a reality. There were surely few less likely places for labours most of the world would have judged ungodly than an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavour had been shot through with paradox.

For one, the liaison between Jaffe and himself. For another, the intermingling of disciplines that had made the Great Work possible. And for a third the fact that now, in what should have been his moment of triumph, he was minutes away from destroying the Nuncio before it fell into the hands of the very man who’d funded its creation.

As in its making, so in its unmaking: system, obsession and pain. Fletcher was too well versed in the ambiguities of matter to believe that the total destruction of anything was possible. Things couldn’t be undiscovered. But if the change that he and Raul wrought on the evidence was thorough enough it was his belief that nobody would easily reconstruct the experiment he’d conducted here in the wilds of Baja California. He and the boy (it was still difficult to think of Raul as a boy) had to be like perfect thieves, rifling their own house to remove every last trace of themselves. When they’d burned all the research notes and trashed all the equipment it had to be as though the Nuncio had never been made. Only then could he take the boy, who was still busy feeding the fires in front of the Mission, to this cliff edge, so that hand in hand they could fling themselves off. The fall was steep, and the rocks below plenty sharp enough to kill them. The tide would wash their blood and bodies out into the Pacific. Then, between fire and water, the job would have been done.

None of which would prevent some future investigator from finding the Nuncio all over again; but the combination of disciplines and circumstances which had made that possible were very particular. For humanity’s sake Fletcher hoped they would not occur again for many years. There was good reason for such hope. Without Jaffe’s strange, half-intuitive grasp of occult principles to marry with his own scientific methodology, the miracle would not have been made, and how often did men of science sit down with men of magic (the suit-mongers, as Jaffe called them) and attempt a mingling of crafts? It was good they didn’t. There was too much dangerous stuff to discover. The occultists whose codes Jaffe had broken knew more about the nature of things than Fletcher would ever have suspected. Beneath their metaphors, their talk of the Bath of Rebirth, and of golden Progeny begotten by fathers of lead, they were ambitious for the same solutions he’d sought all his life. Artificial ways to advance the evolutionary urge: to take the human beyond itself. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown. They knew whereof they wrote. Between his science and theirs Fletcher had solved the problem. Synthesized a fluid that would carry evolution’s glad tidings through any living system, pressing (so he believed) the humblest cell towards a higher condition. Nuncio he’d called it: the Messenger. Now he knew he’d misnamed it. It was not a messenger of the gods, but the god itself. It had a life of its own. It had energy, and ambition. He had to destroy it, before it began to rewrite Genesis, beginning with Randolph Jaffe as Adam.

‘Father?’

Raul had appeared behind him. Once again the boy had stripped off his clothes. After years of going naked, he was still unable to get used to their constrictions. And once again he used that damn word.

‘I’m not your father,’ Fletcher reminded him. ‘I never was and never will be. Can’t you get that into your head?’

As ever, Raul listened. His eyes lacked whites, and were difficult to read, but his steady gaze never failed to mellow Fletcher.

‘What do you want?’ he said more softly.

‘The fires,’ the boy replied.

‘What about them?’

‘The wind, father –’ he began.

It had got up in the last few minutes, coming straight off the ocean. When Fletcher followed Raul round to the front of the Mission, in the lee of which they’d built the Nuncio’s pyres, he found the notes being scattered, many of them far from consumed.

‘Damn you,’ Fletcher said, as much irritated by his own lack of attention to the task as the boy’s. ‘I told you: don’t put too much paper on at the same time.’

He took hold of Raul’s arm, which was covered in silky hair, as was his entire body. There was a distinct smell of singeing, where the flames had risen suddenly and caught the boy by surprise. It took, he knew, considerable courage on Raul’s part to overcome his primal fear of fire. He was doing it for his father’s sake. He’d have done it for no other. Contrite, Fletcher put his arm around Raul’s shoulder. The boy clung, the way he’d clung in his previous incarnation, burying his face in the smell of the human.

‘We’d better just let them go,’ Fletcher said, watching as another gust of wind took leaves off the fire and scattered them like pages from a calendar, day upon day of pain and inspiration. Even if one or two of them were to be found, and that was unlikely along such a barren stretch of coast, nobody would be able to make any sense of them. It was only his obsessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and shouldn’t he know better, when that very obsessiveness had been one of the qualities that had brought this waste and tragedy about?

The boy detached himself from around Fletcher and turned back to the fires.

‘No Raul…’ he said, ‘… forget them … let them go …’

The boy chose not to hear; a trick he’d always had, even before the changes the Nuncio’s touch had brought about. How many times had Fletcher summoned the ape Raul had been only to have the wretched animal wilfully ignore him? It was in no small measure that very perversity which had encouraged Fletcher to test the Great Work on him: a whisper of the human in the simian which the Nuncio turned into a shout.

Raul wasn’t making an attempt to collect the dispersed papers, however. His small, wide body was tensed, his head tilted up. He was sniffing the air.

‘What is it?’ Fletcher said. ‘You can smell somebody?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Coming up the hill.’

Fletcher knew better than to question Raul’s observation. The fact that he, Fletcher, could hear and smell nothing was simply a testament to the decadence of his senses. Nor did he need to ask from which direction their visitor was coming. There was only one route up to the Mission. Forging a single road through such inhospitable terrain, then up a steep hill, must have taxed even the masochism of Jesuits. They’d built one road, and the Mission, and then, perhaps failing to find God up here, vacated the place. If their ghosts ever drifted through, they’d find a deity now, Fletcher thought, in three phials of blue fluid. So would the man coming up the hill. It could only be Jaffe. Nobody else knew of their presence here.