The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker
"I remember you," she said.
"I'm glad."
"See, Momma?" Jo-Beth said. "This isn't so bad."
"I haven't seen you in the Grove for such a long time," William said.
"I've been . . . unwell," Joyce said.
"And now?"
She declined to answer at first. Then she said:
"I think I'm getting better."
"That's good to hear."
As he spoke the sound of sobbing came to them from one of the aisles. Jo-Beth noticed it more than any of the other customers: a strange tension between her mother and Mr. Witt (whom she'd seen most every morning of her working life, but never dressed in so disheveled a fashion) had claimed their attention utterly, and everyone else in the line seemed to be making a studied attempt not to notice. She let go of Momma's arm and went to investigate, tracing the sound of the weeping from aisle to aisle until she found its source. Ruth Gilford, who was the receptionist at the offices of Momma's doctor, and was familiar to Jo-Beth, was standing in front of a selection of cereals, a box of one brand in her left hand and of another in her right, tears pouring down her cheeks. The cart at her side was heaped high with more boxes of cereal, as though she'd simply taken one of each as she'd wheeled her way along the aisle. "Mrs. Gilford?" Jo-Beth ventured.
The woman didn't stop sobbing, but tried to speak through her tears, which resulted in a watery and at times incoherent monologue.
". . . don't know what he wants . . ." she seemed to be saying. ". . . after all this time . . . don't know what he wants . . ."
"Can I help?" Jo-Beth said. "Do you want me to take you home?"
The word home made Ruth look around at Jo-Beth, attempting to focus on her through the tears.
" . . . I don't know what he wants . . ." she said again.
"Who?" Jo-Beth said.
". . . all these years . . . and he's got something hiding from me . . ."
"Your husband?"
". . . I said nothing, but I knew . . . I always knew . . . he loved somebody else . . . and now he's got her in the house . . ."
The tears redoubled. Jo-Beth went to her, and very gently claimed the packets of cereal from her hands, putting them back on the shelves. With her talismans gone, Ruth Gilford took fierce hold of Jo-Beth.
". . . help me . . ." she said.
"Of course."
"I don't want to go home. He's got somebody there."
"All right. Not if you don't want to."
She started to coax the woman away from the cereal display. Once out of their influence, her anguish diminished somewhat.
"You're Jo-Beth, aren't you?" she managed.
"That's right."
"Will you take me to my car . . . I don't think I can get there on my own."
"We're going, you'll be fine," Jo-Beth reassured her, moving to Ruth's right-hand side so as to protect her from the gaze of those waiting in line if they chose to stare. She doubted they would. Ruth Gilford's collapse was too tender a sight for them to look straight at; it would remind them all too forcibly of what secrets they themselves were barely holding in check.
Momma was at the door, with William Witt. Jo-Beth decided to forsake introductions, which Ruth was in no state to respond to anyway, and just tell Momma she'd meet her at the bookstore, which had still been closed when they'd arrived. For the first time in her life, Lois was late opening up. But it was Momma who took the initiative.
"Mr. Witt will bring me home, Jo-Beth," she said "Don't worry about me."
Jo-Beth glanced at Witt, who had the look of a man almost mesmerized.
"Are you sure?" she said. It had never occurred to her before but perhaps the ever unctuous Mr. Witt was the type Momma had been warning her about all these years. The deep, silent type whose secrets were always the most depraved. But Momma was insistent; almost casual in the way she waved Jo-Beth off.
Crazy, Jo-Beth thought as she escorted Ruth to the car, the whole world's gone crazy. People changing at a moment's notice, as though the way they'd been all these years was just a pretense: Momma sick, Mr. Witt neat, Ruth Gilford in charge. Were they just reinventing themselves, or was this the way they'd always been?
As they got to the car Ruth Gilford was taken over by another, even more desperate, bout of crying, and tried to return to the supermarket, insistent that she couldn't go back home without cereal. Jo-Beth gently persuaded her otherwise, and volunteered to drive home with her, an invitation which was gratefully accepted.
Jo-Beth's thoughts returned to Momma as she drove Ruth home, but they were literally overtaken, as a convoy of four black stretch limos purred past and turned up the Hill, their presence so utterly alien they might just have driven in from another dimension.
Visitors, she thought. As if there weren't enough.
III
SO IT begins," said the Jaff.
He was standing at the highest window of Coney Eye, looking down upon the driveway. It was a little before noon, and the limos gliding up the driveway announced the first of the party guests. He would have liked to have Tommy-Ray at his side at this juncture, but the boy had not yet returned from his trip to the Mission. No matter. Lamar had proved a more than able substitute. There had been one uncomfortable moment, when the Jaff had finally put off the mask of being Buddy Vance and presented his true face to the comedian, but it hadn't taken long to bring the man around. In some regard he was more preferable company to Tommy-Ray; more sensual, more cynical. What was more he had a thorough knowledge of the guests who would soon be gathering in Buddy Vance's memory; a more thorough knowledge, indeed, than the widow Rochelle. She had sunk deeper and deeper into a drug-induced stupor since the previous evening; a condition which Lamar had taken sexual advantage of, much to the Jaff's amusement. Once upon a time (so long ago) he might have done the same, of course. No, not might, would. Rochelle Vance was undoubtedly beautiful, and her addiction, informed as it was by a constant undercurrent of rage, made her even more attractive. But these were affairs of the flesh, and for another life. There were more urgent pursuits: namely, the power to be garnered from the guests who were even now gathering below. Lamar had run down the list with him, offering some savage observation or other on practically every one. Corrupt lawyers, addicted actors, reformed whores, pimps, priapists, hitmen, white men with black souls, hot men with cold, ass-kissers, coke-sniffers, the wretched high, the more wretched low, egotists, onanists and hedonists to a man. Where better to find the kind of forces he needed to keep him from harm when the Art opened? He would find fears in these addicted, bewildered, inflated souls of a kind he'd never have found in the mere bourgeois. From them he'd raise terata the like of which the world had never seen. Then he'd be ready. Fletcher was dead, and his army, if it had indeed manifested itself, was keeping its head low.
There was nothing left between the Jaff and Quiddity.
As he stood at the window and watched the victims disembark, greeting one another with rhinestone smiles and pinched kisses, his thoughts went—of all places—to that dead-letter room in Omaha, Nebraska, where, so many lives ago, he'd first had a hint of America's secret self. He remembered Homer, who'd opened the door to that treasure house, and later died against it, his life stabbed out by the blunt-bladed knife the Jaff still carried in his jacket pocket. Death had meant something then. Been an experience to go in dread of. It wasn't until he'd stepped into the Loop that he'd realized how irrelevant such fears were, when time could be suspended, even by a minor charlatan like Kissoon. Presumably the shaman was still secure in his refuge, as far from his spiritual creditors, or the lynch-mob, as it was possible to get. Lingering in the Loop, planning the getting of power. Or holding it at bay.
That last notion occurred to him now for the first time, like a long-postponed solution to a puzzle he hadn't even known he'd been gnawing at. Kissoon had been holding the moment because if he once let it slip he'd unleash his own death . . .
"Well . . ." he murmured.
Lamar was behind
"Just musing," the Jaff said. He turned from the window. "Is the widow already downstairs?"
"I'm trying to rouse her."
"Who's greeting the guests?"
"Nobody."
"Go to it."
"I thought you wanted me here."
"Later. Once they've all arrived you can bring them up one by one."
"As you wish."
"One question."
"Only one?"
"Why aren't you afraid of me?"
Lamar narrowed his already narrow eyes. Then said:
"I've still got my sense of the ridiculous."
Without waiting for any riposte from the Jaff he opened the door and headed about his duties as host. The Jaff turned back to the window. Another limo was at the gates, this one white, its driver showing his passengers' invitations to the guards.
"One by one," the Jaff murmured to himself. "One by wretched one."
Grillo's invitation to the party at Coney Eye had been delivered by hand mid-morning, its courier Ellen Nguyen. Her manner was friendly but brisk; there was no trace of the intimacy that had flowered between them the previous afternoon. He invited her into his hotel room but she insisted that there was no time:
"I'm needed up at the house," she said. "Rochelle seems to be completely out of it. I don't think you need give a second thought to being recognized. But you will need the invitation. Fill in whatever name you want to invent. There'll be a lot of security so don't lose it. This is one party you won't be able to talk your way into."
"Where will you be?"
"I don't even think I'll be there."
"I thought you said you were going up there now."
"Just for the preparations. As soon as the party starts, I'm out. I don't want to mix with those people. Parasites, all of them. None of them really loved Buddy. It's just a show."
"Well I'll tell it like I see it."
"Do that," she said, turning to go.
"Could we just talk a moment?" Grillo said.
"About what? I haven't got much time."
"About you and me," Grillo said. "About what happened yesterday."
She looked at him without focusing her gaze. "What happened, happened," she said. "We were both there. What's to say?"
"Well for one: how about trying it again?"
Again, the unfixed look.
"I don't think so," she said.
"You didn't give me a chance—" he said.
"Oh no," she replied, eager to correct any error he was about to make. "You were fine . . . but things have changed."
"Since yesterday?"
"Yes," she said. "I can't quite tell you how . . ." She let the sentence hang, then took another thought up. "We're both adults. We know how these things work."
He was about to say that no, he didn't know how this or any other thing worked any longer, but that after this conversation his self-esteem was enfeebled enough without beating it to its knees with further confessions.
"Be careful at the party," she said as she once more turned to go.
He couldn't keep himself from saying, "Thanks for that at least."
She returned him a small, enigmatic smile, and left.
IV
THE trip back to the Grove had been lengthy for Tommy-Ray, but it was lengthier still for Tesla and Raul, though for less metaphysical reasons. For one, Tesla's car was not so hot, and it had taken quite a beating on the way down; it was now much the worse for wear. For another, though she had been raised from near death by the touch of the Nuncio, it had left her with side-effects the full extent of which she didn't really grasp until they were over the border. Though she was driving a solid car along a solid highway her grasp of that solidity was not as good as it had been. She felt a pull on her from other places and other states of mind. She'd driven high on drugs and drink in the past but what she was experiencing now was a wilder ride altogether, as though her brain had summoned up from memory fragments of every trip she'd ever taken, every hallucinogen, every tranquilizer, and was running her through the lot, giving her mind a shot of each. One moment she knew she was whooping like a wild thing (she could hear herself, like another voice), the next she was floating in ether with the highway dissolving in front of her, the next her thoughts were filthier than the New York subway, and it was all she could do to stop herself putting an end to the whole damn farce of living with one turn of the wheel. Through it all, two facts. One, that of Raul sitting beside her, gripping the dashboard with white-knuckled hands, his fear pungent. The other, the place that she'd visited in her Nunciate dream, Kissoon's Loop. Though it was not as real as the car she was travelling in, and the smell of Raul, it was no less insistent. She carried its memory with her every mile they covered. Trinity, he'd called it, and it, or Kissoon himself, wanted her back. She felt its pull, almost like a physical claim upon her. She resisted it, though not entirely willingly. Though she'd been glad to be delivered back into life, what she'd seen and heard in her time in Trinity made her curious to return; even anxious. The more she resisted the more exhausted she became, until by the time they reached the outskirts of L.A. she was like someone deprived of sleep: with waking dreams threatening to erupt at any moment into the texture of reality.
"We're going to have to stop for a while," she told Raul, aware that she was slurring as she spoke. "Or I'm going to end up killing us both."
"You want to sleep?"
"I don't know," she said, afraid that to sleep would invite as many problems as it would solve. "At least rest. Get some coffee inside me, and put my mind in order."
"Here?" said Raul.
"Here what?"
"We stop here?"
"No," she said. "We'll go back to my apartment. It's half an hour from here. That's if we fly—"
You already are, baby, her mind said, and you'll probably never stop. You're a resurrected woman. What do you expect? That life should simply fumble on as though nothing had happened? Forget it. Things'll never be the same again.
But West Hollywood hadn't changed; still Boy's Town prettified: the bars, the style stores where she bought her jewelry. She took a left off Santa Monica on to North Huntley Drive, where she'd lived for the five years she'd been in L.A. It was almost noon now, and the smog was burning off the city. She parked the car in the garage below the building, and took Raul up to Apartment V. The windows of her downstairs neighbor, a sour, repressed little man with whom she'd exchanged no more than three sentences in half a decade, and two of those invective, were open, and he doubtless saw her passing. She estimated it would take him twenty minutes at the most to inform the block that Miss Lonelyhearts, as she'd heard he called her, was back in town—looking like shit, and accompanied by Quasimodo. So be it. She had other things to worry about, like how to align her key with the lock, a trick which repeatedly defeated her confounded senses. Raul came to the rescue, taking the key from her trembling fingers and letting them both in. The apartment, as usual, was a disaster area. She left the door wide and opened the windows to let in some less stale air, then played her messages. Her agent had called twice, both times to report that there was no further news on the castaway screenplay; Saralyn had called, asking if she knew where Grillo was. Following Saralyn, Tesla's mother: her contribution more a litany of sins than a message—crimes committed by the world in general, and her father in particular. Finally there was a message from Mickey de Falco, who made spare bucks providing orgasmic grunts for fuck films, and needed a partner for a gig. In the background, a barking dog. "And as soon as you're back," he said in signing off, "come and get this fucking dog before it eats me outta house and home." She caught Raul watching her as she listened to the calls, his bemusement unconcealed.
"My peer group," she said when Mickey had said his farewells. "Aren't they a gas? Look, I'm going to have a little nap. It's obvious where everything is, right? Refrigerator; TV; toilet. Wake me in an hour, yeah?"
"An hour."
"I'd like tea, but we don
"Yes . . ." he replied doubtfully.
"Slurring my words?"
"Yes."
"Thought so. OK. The apartment's yours. Don't answer the phone. See you in an hour."
She stumbled through to the bathroom without waiting for further confirmation, stripped down completely, contemplated a shower, settled for a splash of cold water on her face, breasts and arms, then went through to the bedroom. The room was hot, but she knew better than to open the window. When her immediate neighbor Ron woke, which was around now, he would start to play opera. It was either the heat of the room or Lucia di Lammermoor. She chose to sweat.
Left to his own devices Raul found a selection of edibles in the refrigerator, took them to the open window, sat down, and shook. He could not remember being so afraid, back since the day Fletcher's madness had begun. Now, as then, the rules of the world had suddenly changed without warning, and he no longer knew what his purpose was to be. In his heart of hearts he'd given up hoping to see Fletcher again. The shrine he'd kept at the Mission, which had been a beacon at the start, had become a memorial. He'd expected to die there, alone, humored to the last as a half-wit, which in many ways he was. He could scarcely write, except to scrawl his own name. He couldn't read. Most of the objects in the woman's room were a total mystery to him. He was lost.
A cry from the next room stirred him from self-pity.
"Tesla?" he called.
There was no coherent reply: only further muted cries. He got up and followed the sound. The door to her bedroom was closed. He hesitated, hand on handle, nervous of entering without invitation. Then another round of cries reached him. He pushed the door open.
He'd never in his life seen a woman so exposed. The sight of Tesla sprawled on the bed transfixed him. Her arms were at her sides, gripping the sheet, her head rolled from side to side. But there was a fogginess about her body that reminded him of what had happened on the road below the Mission. She was moving away from him again. Back towards the Loop. Her shouts had become moans now. They were not of pleasure. She was going unwillingly.