The Great and Secret Show

‘How deep is it?’ Jose Luis asked.

‘Huh?’

‘The crack.’

‘It’s not a crack. It’s a fucking abyss. I dropped a stone down a minute ago. I’m still waiting for it to hit bottom.’

The realization that he was alone came to Buddy slowly, like a memory stirred up from the silt at the bottom of his brain. Indeed at first he thought it was a memory, of a sand storm he’d been caught in once, on his third honeymoon, in Egypt. But he was lost and guideless in this maelstrom as he’d not been then. And it was not sand that stung his eyes back into sight, nor wind that beat his ears into hearing. It was another power entirely, less natural than a storm, and trapped as no storm had ever been here in a chimney of stone. He saw the hole he’d fallen down for the first time, stretching above him to a sunlit sky so far from him no hint of its reassurance touched him. Whatever ghosts haunted this place, spinning themselves into creation in front of him, they surely came from a time before his species was a gleam in evolution’s eye. Things awesomely simple; powers of fire and ice.

He was not so wrong; and yet completely. The forms emerging from the darkness a short distance from where he lay seemed in one moment to resemble men like himself, and in the next unalloyed energies, wrapped around each other like champions in a war of snakes, sent from their tribes to strangle the life from each other. The vision ignited his nerves as well as his senses. The pain he’d been spared seeped into his consciousness, the trickle becoming first a stream and then a flood. He felt as though he was laid on knives, their points slicing between his vertebrae, puncturing his innards.

Too weak even to moan, all he could be was a mute, suffering witness of the spectacle in front of him, and hope that salvation or death came quickly, to put him out of this agony. Best death, he thought. A godless sonofabitch like him had no hope of redemption, unless the holy books were wrong and fornicators, drunkards and blasphemers were fitted for paradise. Better death, and be done with it. The joke ended here.

I want to die, he thought.

As he formed the intention, one of the entities battling in front of him turned his way. He saw a face in the storm. It was bearded, its flesh so swelled with emotion it seemed to dwarf the body it was set upon, like that of a foetus: skull domed, eyes vast. The terror he felt when it laid its gaze on him was nothing to that which he felt when its arms reached for him. He wanted to crawl away into some niche and escape the touch of the spirit’s fingers, but his body was beyond coaxing or bullying.

‘I am the Jaff,’ he heard the bearded spirit say. ‘Give me your mind, I want terata.’

As the fingertips grazed Buddy’s face he felt a spurt of power, white like lightning, cocaine, or semen, run through his head and down into his anatomy. With it, the recognition that he’d made an error. The split flesh and broken bone was not all he was. Despite his immoralities, there was something in him the Jaff coveted; a corner of his being which this occupying force could profit by. He’d called it terata. Buddy had no idea what that word meant. But he understood all too clearly the terror when the spirit entered him. The touch was lightning, burning a path into his essential self. And a drug too, making images of that invasion cavort in his mind’s eye. And jism? That as well, or else why did a life he’d never had before, a creature born in his pith from the Jaff’s rape, leap out of him now?

He glimpsed it as it went. It was pale and primitive. No face, but legs by the scrabbling dozen. No mind, either, except to do the Jaff’s will. The bearded face laughed to see it. Withdrawing his fingers from Buddy, the spirit let his other arm drop from the neck of his enemy and, riding the terata headed up the rock chimney towards the sun.

The remaining combatant fell back against the cavern wall. From where he lay Buddy caught a glimpse of the man. He looked much less the warrior than his opponent, and consequently more brutalized by their exchange. His body was wasted, his expression one of weary distraction. He stared up the rock chimney.

‘Jaffe!’ he called, his shout shaking dust from the shelves Buddy had struck on his way down. There was no answer from the shaft. The man looked down towards Buddy, narrowing his eyes.

‘I’m Fletcher,’ he said, his voice mellifluous. He moved towards Buddy, trailing a subtle light. ‘Forget your pain.’

Buddy tried his damnedest to say: help me, but he didn’t need to. Fletcher’s very proximity soothed the agonies he felt.

‘Imagine with me,’ Fletcher said. ‘Your fondest wish.’

To die, Buddy thought.

The spirit heard the unspoken reply.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t imagine death. Please don’t imagine death. I can’t arm myself with that.’

Arm yourself? Buddy thought.

‘Against the Jaff.’

Who are you?

‘Men once. Spirits now. Enemies forever. You have to help me. I need the last squeezings of your mind, or I go to war with him naked.’

Sorry, I already gave, Buddy thought. You saw him do the taking. And by the way, what was that thing?

‘The terata? Your primal fears made solid. He’s riding to the world on it.’ Fletcher looked up the chimney again. ‘But he won’t break surface yet. The day’s too bright for him.’

Is it still day?

‘Yes.’

How do you know?

‘The process of the sun still moves me, even here. I wanted to be sky, Vance. Instead, two decades I’ve lived in darkness, with the Jaff at my throat. Now he’s taking the war overground, and I need arms against him, plucked out of your head.’

There’s nothing left, Buddy said. I’m finished.

‘Quiddity must be preserved,’ Fletcher said.

Quiddity?

‘The dream-sea. You might even see its island, as you die. It’s wonderful; I envy you the freedom to leave this world …’

Heaven you mean? Buddy thought. Is it Heaven you mean? If so, I haven’t got a chance.

‘Heaven’s only one of many stories, told on the shores of Ephemeris. There are hundreds, and you’ll know them all. So don’t be afraid. Only give me a little of your mind, so that Quiddity may be preserved.’

Who from?

‘The Jaff, who else?’

Buddy had never been much of a dreamer. His sleep, when it wasn’t drugged or drunk, was that of a man who lived himself to exhaustion daily. After a gig, or a fuck, or both, he would give himself to sleep as to a rehearsal for the final oblivion that called him now. With the fear of nullity a rod to his broken back he scrabbled to make sense of Fletcher’s words. A sea; a shore; a place of stories, in which Heaven was just one of many possibilities? How could he have lived his life and never known this place?

‘You’ve known it,’ Fletcher told him. ‘You’ve swum Quiddity twice in your life. The night you were born, and the night you first slept beside the one you loved most in your life. Who was that, Buddy? There’ve been so many women, right? Which one of them meant most to you? Oh … but of course. In the end, there was only one. Am I right? Your mother.’

How the hell did you know that?

‘Put it down to a lucky guess …’

Liar!

‘OK, so I’m digging around in your thoughts a little. Forgive me the trespass. I need help, Buddy, or the Jaff has me beaten. You don’t want that.’

No, I don’t.

‘Imagine for me. Give me something more than regret to make an ally of. Who are your heroes?’

Heroes?

‘Picture them for me.’

Comedians! All of them.

‘An army of comedians? Why not?’