The Great and Secret Show

‘No.’

‘But you’d like to have done it? I can taste hatred in you.’

‘Yes, I’d have killed him if I’d had the chance.’ He smiled.

‘And me as well, I think,’ Fletcher said. ‘Is that a knife in your pocket,’ he asked, ‘or are you just pleased to see me?’

‘I want the Nuncio,’ Jaffe said. ‘I want it, and it wants me …’

He turned away. Fletcher called after him.

‘It works on the mind, Jaffe. Maybe on the soul. Don’t you understand? Nothing outside that doesn’t begin inside. Nothing real that isn’t dreamed first. Me? I never wanted my body except as a vehicle. Never really wanted anything at all, except to be sky. But you, Jaffe. You! Your mind’s full of shit. Think of that. Think what the Nuncio’s going to magnify. I beg you –’

The entreaty, breathed in his skull, made Jaffe halt a moment, and look back at the portrait. It had risen from its chair, though by the expression on Fletcher’s face it was a torment to tear himself away from the view.

‘I beg you,’ he said again. ‘Don’t let it use you.’

Fletcher extended a hand towards Jaffe’s shoulder, but he retreated out of touching range, stepping through into the laboratory. His eyes almost instantly came to rest on the bench and the two phials left in the rack, their contents boiling up against the glass.

‘Beautiful,’ Jaffe said, and stepped towards them, the Nuncio leaping up in the phials at his approach, like a dog wanting to lick its master’s face. Its fawning made a lie of Fletcher’s fears. He, Randolph Jaffe, was the user in this exchange. The Nuncio, the used.

In his head, Fletcher continued to issue his warning:

‘Every cruelty in you, Jaffe, every fear, every stupidity, every cowardice. All making you over. Are you prepared for that? I don’t think so. It’ll show you too much.’

‘No such thing as too much,’ Jaffe said, tuning the protests out and reaching for the nearest of the phials. The Nuncio couldn’t wait. It broke the glass, its contents jumping to meet his skin. His knowledge (and his terror) were instantaneous, the Nuncio communicating its message on contact. The moment Jaffe realized Fletcher was right was the same moment he became powerless to correct the error.

The Nuncio had little or no interest in changing the order of his cells. If that happened it would only be as a consequence of a profounder alteration. It viewed his anatomy as a cul-de-sac. What minor improvements it could make in the system were beneath its notice. It wasn’t going to waste time sophisticating finger-joints or taking the kinks out of the lower bowel. It was an evangelist not a beautician. Mind was its target. Mind which used body for its gratification, even when that gratification harmed the vehicle. Mind which was the source of the hunger for transformation and its most ardent and creative agent.

Jaffe wanted to beg for help, but the Nuncio had already taken control of his cortex, and he was prevented from uttering a word. Prayer was no more plausible. The Nuncio was God. Once in a bottle; now in his body. He couldn’t even die, though his system shook so violently it seemed ready to throw itself apart. The Nuncio forbade everything but its work. Its awesome, perfecting work.

Its first act was to throw his memory into reverse, shooting him back through his life from the moment it touched him, piercing each event until he struck the waters of his mother’s womb. He was granted a moment of agonizing nostalgia for that place – its calm, its safety – before his life came to drag him out again, and began the return journey, revisiting his little life in Omaha. From the beginning of his conscious life there’d been so much rage. Against the petty and the politic; against the achievers and the seducers, the ones who made the girls and the grades. He felt it all over again, but intensified: like a cancer cell getting fat in the flick of an eye, distorting him. He saw his parents fading away, and him unable to hold on to them, or – when they’d gone – to mourn them, but raged nevertheless, not knowing why they’d lived, or bothered to bring him into the world. He fell in love again, twice. Was rejected again, twice. Nurtured the hurt, decorated the scars, let the rage grow fatter and fatter. And between those notable lows the perpetual grind of jobs that he couldn’t hold, and people who forgot his name day on day, and Christmases coming on Christmases, and only age to mark them. Never getting closer to understanding why he’d been made – why anyone was made, when everything was a cheat and a sham and went to nothing anyway.

Then, the room at the crossroads, filled with Dead Letters, and suddenly his rage had echoes from coast to coast, wild, bewildered people like him stabbing at their confusion and hoping to see sense when it bled. Some of them had. They’d tumbled mysteries, albeit fleetingly. And he had the evidence. Signs and codes; the Medallion of the Shoal, falling into his hands. A moment later he had his knife buried in Homer’s head, and he was away, with only a parcel of clues, on a trip that had taken him, growing more powerful with every step, to Los Alamos, and the Loop, and finally to the Misión de Santa Catrina.

And still he didn’t know why he’d been made, but he’d accrued enough in his four decades for the Nuncio to give him a temporary answer. For rage’s sake. For revenge’s sake. For the having of power and the using of power.

Momentarily he hovered over the scene, and saw himself on the floor below, curled round in a litter of glass, clutching at his skull as though to keep it from splitting. Fletcher moved into view. He seemed to be haranguing the body, but Jaffe couldn’t hear the words. Some self-righteous speech, no doubt, on the frailty of human endeavour. Suddenly he rushed at the body, his arms raised, and brought his fists down upon it. It came apart, like the portrait at the window. Jaffe howled as his dislocated spirit was claimed for the substance on the floor, drawn down into his Nunciate anatomy.

He opened his eyes and looked up at the man who’d struck off his crust, seeing Fletcher with new comprehension.

From the beginning they’d been an uneasy partnership, the fundamental principles of which had confounded both. But now Jaffe saw the mechanism clearly. Each was the other’s nemesis. No two entities on earth were so perfectly opposed. Fletcher loving light as only a man in terror of ignorance could; one eye gone from looking at the sun’s face. He was no longer Randolph Jaffe, but the Jaff, the one and only, in love with the dark where his rage had found its sustenance and its expression. The dark where sleep came, and the trip to the dream-sea beyond sleep began. Painful as the Nuncio’s education had been, it was good to be reminded of what he was. More than reminded, magnified through the glass of his own history. Not in the dark now, but of it, capable of using the Art. His hand already itched to do so. And with the itch came a grasp of how to snatch the veil aside and enter Quiddity. He didn’t need ritual. He didn’t need suits or sacrifices. He was an evolved soul. His need could not be denied, and he had need in abundance.

But in reaching this new self he had accidentally created a force that would, if he didn’t stop here and now, oppose him every step of the way. He got to his feet, not needing to hear a challenge from Fletcher’s lips to know that the enmity between them was perfectly understood. He read the revulsion in the flame that flared behind his enemy’s eye. The genius sauvage, the dope-fiend and Pollyanna Fletcher had been dissolved and reconstructed: joyless, dreamy and bright. Minutes ago he’d been ready to sit by the window, longing to be sky, until longing or death did its work. But not now.

‘I see the whole thing,’ he announced, choosing to use his voice-box now that they were equal and opposite. ‘You tempted me to raise you up, so you could steal your way to revelation.’

‘And I will,’ the Jaff replied. ‘I’m half way there already.’

‘Quiddity won’t open to the likes of you.’

‘It’ll have no choice,’ the Jaff replied, ‘I’m inevitable now.’ He raised his hand. Beads of power, like tiny ball-bearings, came sweating from it. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘I’m an Artist.’

‘Not ’til you use the Art you’re not.’

‘And who’s going to stop me? You?’

‘I’ve got no choice. I’m responsible.’

‘How? I beat you to a pulp once. I’ll do it again.’

‘I’ll raise visions to oppose you.’

‘You can try.’ A question came into the Jaff mind as he spoke, which Fletcher had begun to answer before the other had even voiced it.

‘Why did I touch your body? I don’t know. It demanded I did. I kept trying to shout it down, but it called.’

He paused, then said:

‘Maybe opposites attract, even in our condition.’

‘Then the sooner you’re dead, the better,’ the Jaff said, and reached to tear out his enemy’s throat.

In the darkness that was creeping over the Mission from the Pacific, Raul heard the first din of battle begin. He knew from echoes in his own Nunciate system that the distillation had been at work behind the walls. His father, Fletcher, had gone out of his own life and into something new. So had the other man, the one he’d always distrusted, even when words like evil were just sounds from a human palate. He understood them now; or at least put them together with his animal response to Jaffe: revulsion. The man was sick to his core, like fruit full of rot. To judge by the sound of violence from inside, Fletcher had decided to fight that corruption. The brief, sweet time he’d had with his father was over. There’d be no more lessons in civility; no more sitting together by the window, listening to ‘the sublime Mozart’ and watching the clouds change shape.

As the first stars appeared, the sounds from the Mission ceased. Raul waited, hoping that Jaffe had been destroyed, but fearing his father had gone too. After an hour in the cold he decided to venture inside. Wherever they’d gone – Heaven or Hell – he couldn’t follow. The best he could do was put on his clothes, which he’d always despised wearing (they chafed and caged) but which were now a reminder of his master’s tuition. He’d wear them always, so as not to forget the Good Man Fletcher.

Reaching the door, he realized that the Mission had not been vacated. Fletcher was still there. So was his enemy. Both men still possessed bodies that resembled their former selves, but there was a change in them. Shapes hovered over each: a huge-headed infant, the colour of smoke, over Jaffe; a cloud, with the sun somewhere in its cushion, over Fletcher. The men had their hands at each other’s throats and eyes. Their subtle bodies were similarly intertwined. Perfectly matched, neither could gain victory.

Raul’s entrance broke the impasse. Fletcher turned, his one good eye focusing on the boy, and in that instant the Jaff took his advantage, flinging his enemy back across the room.

‘Out!’ Fletcher yelled to Raul. ‘Get out!’

Raul did as he was ordered, darting between the dying fires as he raced from the Mission, the ground trembling beneath his bare soles as new furies were unleashed behind him. He had three seconds’ grace to fling himself a little way down the slope before the leeway side of the Mission – walls which had been built to survive until the end of faith – shattered before an eruption of energy. He didn’t cover his eyes against it. Instead he watched, glimpsing the forms of Jaffe and the Good Man Fletcher, twin powers locked together in the same wind, fly out from the centre of the blast over his head, and away into the night.

The force of the explosion had scattered the bonfires. Hundreds of smaller fires now burned around the Mission. The roof had been almost entirely blown off. The walls bore gaping wounds.

Lonely already, Raul limped back towards his only refuge.

VI (#ulink_f5f89cf7-6916-56b6-80fa-e514d8d3bb3e)

There was a war waged in America that year, perhaps the bitterest and certainly the strangest ever fought on, in or above its soil. For the most part it went unreported, because it went unnoticed. Or rather its consequences (which were many, and often traumatic) seemed so unlike the effects of battle they were consistently misinterpreted. But then this was a war without precedent. Even the most crackpot prophets, the kind who annually predicted Armageddon, didn’t know how to interpret the shaking of America’s entrails. They knew something of consequence was afoot, and had Jaffe still been in the Dead Letter Room in Omaha Post Office he would have discovered countless letters flying back and forth, filled with theories and suppositions. None, however – even from correspondents who’d known in some oblique fashion about the Shoal and the Art – came close to the truth.

Not only was the combat without precedent, but its nature developed as the weeks went by. The combatants had left the Misión de Santa Catrina with only a rudimentary understanding of their new condition and the powers that went with it. They soon explored and learned to exploit those powers, however, as the necessity of conflict threw their invention into overdrive. As he’d sworn, Fletcher willed an army from the fantasy lives of the ordinary men and women he met as he pursued Jaffe across the country, never giving him time to concentrate his will and use the Art he had access to. He dubbed these visionary soldiers hallucigenia, after an enigmatic species whose fossil remains recorded their existence five hundred and thirty million years previously. A family which, like the fantasies now named for them, bore no antecedents. These soldiers had lives barely longer than that of butterflies. They soon lost their particularity, becoming smoky and vague. But gossamer as they were, they several times carried the day against the Jaff and his legions, the terata, primal fears which Randolph now had the power to call forth from his victims, and make solid for a time. The terata were no less fleeting than the battalions shaped against them. In that, as in everything else, the Jaff and Good Man Fletcher were equally matched.

So it proceeded, in feints and counterfeits, pincer movements and sweeps, the intention of each army to slaughter the leader of the other. It was not a war the natural world took kindly to. Fears and fantasies were not supposed to take physical form. Their arena was the mind. Now they were solid, their combat raging across Arizona and Colorado, and into Kansas and Illinois, the order of things undone in countless ways by its passage. Crops were slow to show their shoots, preferring to stay in the earth rather than risk their tender heads when creatures in defiance of all natural law were abroad. Flocks of migrating birds, avoiding the paths of haunted thunderheads, came late to their resting grounds, or lost their way entirely and perished. There was in every state a trail of stampedes and gorings, the panicked response of animals who sensed the scale of the conflict being waged to extinction around them. Stallions set their sights on cattle and boulders, and gutted themselves mounting cars. Dogs and cats turned savage overnight, and were shot or gassed for the crime. Fish in quiet rivers tried to take to the land, knowing there was ambition in the air, and perished aspiring.

Fear in front and bedlam behind, the conflict ground to a halt in Wyoming, where the armies, too equally matched for anything but a war of attrition, fought each other to a complete standstill. It was the end of the beginning, or near it. The sheer scale of the energies required by Good Man Fletcher and the Jaff to create and lead these armies (no warlords these, by any stretch of the definition; they were merely men in hate with each other) had taken a terrible toll. Weakened to the point of near collapse they punched on like boxers who’d been battered into a stupor, but who fought because they knew no other sport. Neither would be satisfied until the other was dead.