Imajica

  “Shall I tell you again? I want you to remember, child.”

  “Yes, Mama,” he said. “That would be good. Tell me again.”

  She smiled an infinitesimal smile and began to repeat a story she’d apparently told many times.

  “There was a woman once, called Nisi Nirvana. . . .”

  She’d no sooner started, however, than the dream she was having lost its claim on her, and she began to slip back into a deeper place, her voice losing power as she went.

  “Don’t stop, Mama,” Gentle prompted. “I want to hear. There was a woman . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  “. . . called Nisi Nirvana.”

  “Yes. And she went to a city full of iniquities, where no ghost was holy and no flesh was whole. And something there did a great hurt to her. . . .”

  Her voice was getting stronger again, but the smile, even that tiniest hint, had gone.

  “What hurt was this, Mama?”

  “You needn’t know the hurt, child. You’ll learn about it one day, and on that day you’ll wish you could forget it. Just understand that it’s a hurt only men can do to women.”

  “And who did this hurt to her?” Gentle asked.

  “I told you, child, a man.”

  “But what man?”

  “His name doesn’t matter. What matters is that she escaped him, and came back into her own city, and knew she must make a good thing from this bad that had been done to her. And do you know what that good thing was?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “It was a little baby. A perfect little baby. And she loved it so much it grew big after a time, and she knew it would be leaving her, so she said, ‘I have a story to tell you before you go.’ And do you know what the story was? I want you to remember, child.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana. And she went into a city of iniquities—”

  “That’s the same story, Mama.”

  “—where no ghost was holy—”

  “You haven’t finished the first story. You’ve just begun again.”

  “—and no flesh was whole. And something there—”

  “Stop, Mama,” Gentle said. “Stop.”

  “—did a great hurt to her. . . .”

  Distressed by this loop, Gentle took his hand from his mother’s cheek. She didn’t halt her recitation, however; at least not at first. The story went on exactly as it had before: the escape from the city; the good thing made from the bad; the baby, the perfect little baby. But with the hand no longer on her cheek Celestine was sinking back into unthinking slumber, her voice steadily growing more indistinct. Gentle got up and backed away to the door, as the whispered wheel came full circle again.

  “So she said: I have a story to tell you before you go.”

  Gentle reached behind him and opened the door, his eyes fixed on his mother as the words slurred.

  “And do you know what the story was?” she said. “I want . . . you . . . to . . . remember . . . child.”

  He went on watching her as he slipped out into the hallway. The last sounds he heard would have been nonsense to any ear other than this, but he’d heard this story often enough now to know that she was beginning again as she’d dropped into dreamlessness.

  “There was a woman once . . .”

  On that, he closed the door. For some inexplicable reason, he was shaking, and had to stand at the threshold for several seconds before he could control the tremor. When he turned, he found Clem at the bottom of the stairs, sorting through a selection of candles.

  “Is she still asleep?” he asked as Gentle approached.

  “Yes. Has she talked to you at all, Clem?”

  “Very little. Why?”

  “I’ve just been listening to her tell a story in her sleep. Something about a woman called Nisi Nirvana. Do you know what that means?”

  “Nisi Nirvana. Unless Heaven. Is that somebody’s name?”

  “Apparently. And it must mean a lot to her, for some reason. That’s the name she sent Jude with to fetch me.”

  “And what’s the story?”

  “Damn strange,” Gentle said.

  “Maybe you liked it better when you were a kid.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If I hear her talking again, do you want me to call you down?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gentle said. “I’ve got it by heart already.”

  He started up the stairs.

  “You’re going to need some candles up there,” Clem said. “And matches to light ‘em with.”

  “So I am,” Gentle said, turning back.

  Clem handed over half a dozen candles, thick, stubby, and white. Gentle handed one of them back.

  “Five’s the magic number,” he said.

  “I left some food at the top of the stairs,” Clem said as Gentle started to climb again. “It’s not exactly haute cuisine, but it’s sustenance. And if you don’t claim it now it’ll be gone as soon as the boy gets back.”

  Gentle called his thanks back down the flight, picked up the bread, strawberries, and bottle of beer waiting at the top, then returned to the Meditation Room, closing the door behind him. Perhaps because he was still preoccupied with what he’d heard from his mother’s lips, the memories of Pie were not waiting at the threshold. The room was empty, a cell of the present. It wasn’t until Gentle had set the candles on the mantelpiece, and was lighting one of them, that he heard the mystif speaking softly behind him.

  “Now I’ve distressed you,” it said.

  Gentle turned into the room and found the mystif at the window, where it so often loitered, with a look of deep concern on its face.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” Pie went on. “It’s just idle curiosity. I heard Abelove asking the boy Lucius a day or two ago, and it made me wonder.”

  “What did Lucius say?”

  “He said he remembered being suckled. That was the first thing he could recall: the teat at his mouth.”

  Only now did Gentle grasp the subject under debate here. Once again his memory had found some fragment of conversation between himself and the mystif pertinent to his present concerns. They’d talked of childhood memories in this very room, and the Maestro had been plunged into the same distress which he felt now; and for the same reason.

  “But to remember a story,” Pie was saying. “Particularly one you didn’t like—”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t like it,” the Maestro said. “At least, it didn’t frighten me, the way a ghost story might have done. It was worse than that. . . .”

  “We don’t have to talk about this,” Pie said, and for a moment Gentle thought the conversation was going to fizzle out there. He wasn’t altogether certain he’d have minded if it had. But it seemed to have been one of the unwritten rules of this house that no inquiry was ever fled from, however discomfiting.

  “No, I want to explain if I can,” the Maestro said. “Though what a child fears is sometimes hard to fathom.”

  “Unless we can listen with a child’s heart,” Pie said.

  “That’s harder still.”

  “We can try, can’t we? Tell me the story.”

  “Well, it always began the same way. My mother would say, I want you to remember, child, and I’d know right away what was going to follow. There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana, and she went into a city full of iniquities. . . .”

  Now Gentle heard the story again, this time from his own lips, told to the mystif. The woman; the city; the crime; the child; and then, with a sickening inevitability, the story beginning again with the woman and the city and the crime.

  “Rape isn’t a very pretty subject for a nursery tale,” Pie observed.

  “She never used that word.”

  “But that’s what the crime is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said softly, though he was uncomfortable with the admission. This was his mother’s secret, his mother’s pain. But yes, of course, Nisi Nirvana was Celestine, and the city of terrors w
as the First Dominion. She’d told her child her own story, encoded in a grim little fable. But more bizarrely than that, she’d folded the listener into the tale, and even the telling of the tale itself, creating a circle impossible to break because all of its constituent elements were trapped inside. Was it that sense of entrapment that had so distressed him as a child? Pie had another theory, however, and was voicing it from across the years.

  “No wonder you were so afraid,” the mystif said, “not knowing what the crime was, but knowing it was terrible. I’m sure she meant no harm by it. But your imagination must have run riot.”

  Gentle didn’t reply; or, rather, couldn’t. For the first time in these conversations with Pie he knew more than history did, and the discontinuity fractured the glass in which he’d been seeing the past. He felt a bitter sense of loss, adding to the distress he’d carried into this room. It was as though the tale of Nisi Nirvana marked the divide between the self who’d occupied these rooms two hundred years before, ignorant of his divinity, and the man he was now, who knew that the story of Nisi Nirvana was his mother’s story, and the crime she’d told him about was the act that had brought him into being. There could be no more dallying in the past after this. He’d learned what he needed to know about the Reconciliation, and he couldn’t justify further loitering. It was time to leave the comfort of memory, and Pie with it.

  He picked up the bottle of beer and struck off the cap. It probably wasn’t wise to be drinking alcohol at this juncture, but he wanted to toast the past before it faded from view entirely. There must have been a time, he thought, when he and Pie had raised a glass to the millennium. Could he conjure such a moment now and join his intention with the past one last time? He raised the bottle to his lips and, as he drank, heard Pie laughing across the room. He looked in the mystif’s direction, and there, fading already, he caught a glimpse of his lover, not with a glass in hand but a carafe, toasting the future. He lifted the beer bottle to touch the carafe, but the mystif was fading too fast. Before past and present could share the toast, the vision was gone. It was time to begin.

  Downstairs, Monday was back, talking excitedly. Setting the bottle down on the mantelpiece, Gentle went out onto the landing to find out what all the furor was about. The boy was at the door, in the middle of describing the state of the city to Clem and Jude. He’d never seen a stranger Saturday night, he said. The streets were practically empty. The only thing that was moving was the traffic lights.

  “At least we’ll have an easy trip,” Jude said.

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  She told him, and he was well pleased.

  “I like it out in the country,” he said. “We can do what the fuck we like.”

  “Let’s just make it back alive,” she said. “He’s relying on us.”

  “No problem,” Monday said cheerily. Then, to Clem: “Look after the boss-man, huh? If things get weird, we can always call on Irish and the rest.”

  “Did you tell them where we are?” Clem said.

  “They’re not going to fetch up lookin’ for a bed, don’t worry,” Monday said. “But the way I reckon it, the more friends we got, the better.” He turned to Jude. “I’m ready when you are,” he said, and headed back outside.

  “This shouldn’t take more than two or three hours,” Jude told Clem. “Look after yourself. And him.”

  She glanced up the stairs as she spoke, but the candles at the bottom threw too frail a light to reach the top, and she failed to see Gentle there. It was only when she’d gone from the step, and the car was roaring away down the street, that he made his presence known.

  “Monday’s come back,” Clem said.

  “I heard.”

  “Did he disturb you? I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. I was finished anyway.”

  “The night’s so hot,” Clem said, gazing up at the sky.

  “Why don’t you sleep for a while? I can stand guard.”

  “Where’s that bloody pet of yours?”

  “He’s called Little Ease, Clem, and he’s on the top floor, keeping watch.”

  “I don’t trust him, Gentle.”

  “He’ll do us no harm. Go and lie down.”

  “Have you finished with Pie?”

  “I think I’ve learned what I can. Now I’ve got to check on the rest of the Synod.”

  “How’ll you do that?”

  “I’ll leave my body upstairs and go traveling.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “I’ve done it before. But my flesh and blood’ll be vulnerable while I’m out of it.”

  “As soon as you’re ready to go, wake me. I’ll watch over you like a hawk.”

  “Have an hour’s nap first.”

  Clem picked up one of the candles and went to look for a place to lie down, leaving Gentle to take over his post at the front door. He sat on the step with his head laid against the door frame and enjoyed what little breeze the night could supply. There were no lamps working in the street. It was the light of the moon, and the stars in array around it, that picked out the details in the house opposite and caught the pale undersides of the leaves when the wind lifted them. Lulled, he fell into a doze and missed the shooting stars.

  IV

  “Oh, how beautiful,” the girl said. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and when she laughed, which her beau had made her do a lot tonight, she sounded even younger. But she wasn’t laughing now. She was standing in the darkness staring up at the meteor shower, while Sartori looked on admiringly.

  He’d found her three hours earlier, wandering through the Midsummer Fair on Hampstead Heath, and had easily charmed himself into her company. The fair was doing poor business, with so few people out and about, so when the rides closed down, which they did at the first sign of dusk, he talked her into coming into the City with him. They’d buy some wine, he said, and wander; find a place to sit and talk and watch the stars. It was a long time since he’d indulged himself in a seduction—Judith had been another kind of challenge entirely—but the tricks of the trade came back readily enough, and the satisfaction of watching her resistance crumble, plus the wine he imbibed, did much to assuage the pain of recent defeats.

  The girl—her name was Monica—was both lovely and compliant. She met his gaze only coyly at first, but that was all part of the game, and it contented him to play it for a while, as a diversion from the coming tragedy. Coy as she was, she didn’t reject him when he suggested they take a stroll around the fields of demolished buildings at the back of Shiverick Square, though she made some remark about wanting him to treat her carefully. So he did. They walked together in the darkness until they found a spot where the undergrowth thinned and made a kind of grove. The sky was clear overhead, and she had a fine, swooning sight of the meteor shower.

  “It always makes me feel a little bit afraid,” she told him in a charmless Cockney. “Looking at the stars, I mean.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well . . . we’re so small, aren’t we?”

  He’d asked her earlier to tell him about her life, and she’d volunteered scraps of biography, first about a boy called Trevor, who’d said he loved her but had gone off with her best friend; then about her mother’s collection of china frogs, and how much she’d like to live in Spain, because everybody was so much happier there. But now, without prompting, she told him she didn’t care about Spain or Trevor or the china frogs. She was happy, she said; and the sight of the stars, which usually scared her, tonight made her want to fly, to which he said that they could indeed fly, together, if she just said the word.

  At this she looked away from the sky, with a resigned sigh.

  “I know what you want,” she said. “You’re all the same. Flying. Is that your fancy word for it then?”

  He said she’d misunderstood him completely. He hadn’t brought her here to fumble and fuss with her. That was beneath them both.

  “What then?” she said.

  He answered her with h
is hand, too swiftly to be contradicted. The second primal act, after the one she’d thought he’d brought her here to perform. Her struggles were almost as resigned as her sigh, and she was dead on the ground in less than a minute. Overhead, the stars continued to fall in an abundance he remembered from this time two hundred years before. An unseasonal rain of heavenly bodies, to presage the business of tomorrow night.

  He dismembered and disemboweled her with the greatest care and laid the pieces around the grove in time-honored fashion. There was no need to hurry. This working was better completed in the bleak moments before dawn, and they were still some hours away. When they came, and the working was performed, he had high hopes for it. Godolphin’s body had been cold when he’d used it, and its owner scarcely an innocent. The creatures he’d tempted from the In Ovo with such unappetizing bait had therefore been primitive. Monica, on the other hand, was warm and had not lived long enough to be much soiled. Her death would open a deeper crack in the In Ovo than Godolphin’s, and through it he hoped to draw a particular species of Oviate uniquely suited for the work tomorrow would bring: a sleek, bitter-throated kind, that would help him prove, by tomorrow night, what a child born to destruction could do.

  Seventeen

  AFTER ALL THAT MONDAY had said about the state of the city, Jude had expected to find it completely deserted, but this proved not to be the case. In the time between his returning from the South Bank and their setting out for the estate, the streets of London, which were as devoid of romancing tourists and partiers as Monday had claimed, had become the territory of a third and altogether stranger tribe: that of men and women who had simply got up out of their beds and gone wandering. Almost all of them were alone, as though whatever unease had driven them out into the night was too painful to share with their loved ones. Some were dressed for a day at the office: suits and ties, skirts and sensible shoes. Others were wearing the minimum for decency: many barefoot, many more bare-chested. All wandered with the same languid gait, their eyes turned up to scan the sky.

  As far as Jude could see, the heavens had nothing untoward to show them. She caught sight of a few shooting stars, but that wasn’t so unusual on a clear summer night. She could only assume that these people had in their heads the idea that revelation would come from on high and, having woken with the irrational suspicion that such revelation was imminent, had gone out to look for it.