Imajica Part 14

He tried to reposition himself on the pillow, but the effort was beyond him. His breathing became instantly arduous, and he flinched at some discomfort the motion brought.

"Do you want a painkiller?" Clem asked him.

"No, thanks," he said. "I want to be clearheaded, so Gentle and I can talk." He looked across at his visitor, who was still lingering at the door. "Will you talk to me for a while, John?" he said. "Just the two of us?"

"Of course," Gentle said.

Clem moved from beside the bed and beckoned Gentle across. There was a chair, but Taylor patted the bed, and it was there Gentle sat, hearing the crackle of the plastic undersheet as he did so.

"Call if you need anything," Clem said, the remark directed not at Taylor but at Gentle. Then he left them alone.

"Could you pour me a gla.s.s of water?" Taylor asked.

Gentle did so, realizing as he pa.s.sed it to Taylor that his friend lacked the strength to hold it for himself. He put it to Taylor's lips. There was a salve on them, which moistened them lightly, but they were still split, and puffy with sores. After a few sips Taylor murmured something.

"Enough?" Gentle said.

"Yes, thanks," Taylor replied. Gentle set the gla.s.s down. "I've had just about enough of everything. It's time it was all over."

"You'll get strong again."

"I didn't want to see you so we could sit and lie to each other," Taylor said. "I wanted you here so I could tell you how much I've been thinking about you. Night and day. Gentle."

"I'm sure I don't deserve that."

"My subconscious thinks you do," Taylor replied. "And, while we're being honest, the rest of me too. You don't look as if you're getting enough sleep, Gentle."

"I've been working, that's all."

"Painting?"

"Some of the time. Looking for inspiration, you know."

"I've got a confession to make," Taylor said. "But first, you've got to promise you won't be angry with me."

"What have you done?"

"I told Judy about the night we got together," Taylor said. He stared at Gentle as if expecting there to be some eruption. When there was none, he went on, "I know it was no big deal to you," he said. "But it's been on my mind a lot. You don't mind, do you?"

Gentle shrugged. "I'm sure it didn't come as any big surprise to her."

Taylor turned his hand palm up on the sheet, and Gentle took it. There was no power in Taylor's fingers, but he closed them round Gentle's hand with what little strength he had. His grip was cold.

"You're shaking," Taylor said.

"I haven't eaten in a while," Gentle said.

"You should keep your strength up. You're a busy man."

"Sometimes I need to float a little bit," Gentle replied.

Taylor smiled, and there in his wasted features was a phantom glimpse of the beauty he'd had.

"Oh, yes," he said. "I float all the time. I've been all over the room. I've even been outside the window, looking in at myself. That's the way it'll be when I go, Gentle. I'll float off, only that one time I won't come back. I know Clem's going to miss me-we've had half a lifetime together-but you and Judy will be kind to him, won't you? Make him understand how things are, if you can. Tell him how I floated off. He doesn't want to hear me talk that way, but you understand."

"I'm not sure I do."

"You're an artist," he said.

"I'm a faker."

"Not in my dreams, you're not. In my dreams you want to heal me, and you know what I say? I tell you I don't want to get well. I say I want to be out in the light."

"That sounds like a good place to be," Gentle said. "Maybe I'll join you."

"Are things so bad? Tell me. I want to hear."

"My whole life's f.u.c.ked, Tay."

"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. You're a good man."

"You said we wouldn't tell lies."

"That's no lie. You are. You just need someone to remind you once in a while. Everybody does. Otherwise we slip back into the mud, you know?"

Gentle took tighter hold of Taylor's hand. There was so much in him he had neither the form nor the comprehension to express. Here was Taylor pouring out his heart about love and dreams and how it was going to be when he died, and what did he, Gentle, have by way of contribution? At best, confusion and forgetfulness. Which of them was the sicker, then? he found himself thinking. Taylor, who was frail but able to speak his heart? Or himself, whole but silent? Determined he wouldn't part from this man without attempting to share something of what had happened to him, he fumbled for some words of explanation.

"I think I found somebody," he said. "Somebody to help me... remember myself."

"That's good."

"I'm not sure," he said, his voice gossamer. "I've seen some things in the last few weeks, Tay... things I didn't want to believe until I had no choice. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy."

"Tell me."

"There was someone in New York who tried to kill Jude."

"I know. She told me about it. What about him?" His eyes widened. "Is this the somebody?" he said.

"It's not a he."

"I thought Judy said it was a man."

"It's not a man," Gentle said. "It's not a woman, either. It's not even human, Tay."

"What is it then?"

"Wonderful," he said quietly.

He hadn't dared use a word like that, even to himself. But anything less was a lie, and lies weren't welcome here.

"I told you I was going crazy. But I swear if you had seen the way it changed... it was like nothing on earth."

"And where is it now?"

"I think it's dead," Gentle replied. "I wasted too long to find it. I tried to forget I'd ever set eyes on it. I was afraid of what it was stirring up in me. And then when that didn't work I tried to paint it out of my system. But it wouldn't go. Of course, it wouldn't go. It was part part of me by that time. And then when I finally went to find it... it was too late." of me by that time. And then when I finally went to find it... it was too late."

"Are you sure?" Taylor said. Knots of discomfort had appeared on his face, as Gentle talked, and were tightening.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes," he said. "I want to hear the rest."

"There's nothing else to hear. Maybe Pie's out there somewhere, but I don't know where."

"Is that why you want to float? Are you hoping-" He stopped, his breathing suddenly turning into gasps. "You know, maybe you should should fetch Clem," he said. fetch Clem," he said.

"Of course."

Gentle went to the door, but before he reached it Taylor said, "You've got to understand. Gentle. Whatever the mystery is, you'll have to see it for us both."

With his hand on the door, and ample reason to beat a hasty retreat, Gentle knew he could still choose silence over a reply, could take his leave of the ancient without accepting the quest. But if he answered, and took it, he was bound.

"I'm going to understand," he said, meeting Taylor's despairing gaze. "We both are. I swear."

Taylor managed to smile in response, but it was fleeting. Gentle opened the door and headed out onto the landing. Clem was waiting.

"He needs you," Gentle said.

Clem stepped inside and closed the bedroom door. Feeling suddenly exiled, Gentle headed downstairs. Jude was sitting at the kitchen table, playing with a piece of rock.

"How is he?" she wanted to know.

"Not good," Gentle said. "Clem's gone in to look after him."

"Do you want some tea?"

"No, thanks. What I really need's some fresh air. I think I'll take a walk around the block."

There was a fine drizzle falling when he stepped outside, which was welcome after the suffocating heat of the sickroom. He knew the neighborhood scarcely at all, so he decided to stay close to the house, but his distraction soon got the better of that plan and he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought and the maze of streets. There was a freshness in the wind that made him sigh for escape. This was no place to solve mysteries. After the turn of the year everybody would be stepping up to a new round of resolutions and ambitions, plotting their futures like well-oiled farces. He wanted none of it.

As he began the trek back to the house he remembered that Jude had asked him to pick up milk and cigarettes on his journey, and that he was returning empty-handed. He turned and went in search of both, which took him longer than he expected. When he finally rounded the corner, goods in hand, there was an ambulance outside the house. The front door was open. Jude stood on the step, watching the drizzle. She had tears on her face.

"He's dead," she said.

He stood rooted to the spot a yard from her. "When?" he said, as if it mattered.

"Just after you left."

He didn't want to weep, not with her watching. There was too much else he didn't want to stumble over in her presence. Stony, he said, "Where's Clem?"

"With him upstairs. Don't go up. There's already too many people." She spied the cigarettes in his hand and reached for them. As her hand grazed his, their grief ran between them. Despite his intent, tears sprang to his eyes, and he went into her embrace, both of them sobbing freely, like enemies joined by a common loss or lovers about to be parted. Or else souls who could not remember whether they were lovers or enemies and were weeping at their own confusion.

16

Since the meeting at which the subject of the Tabula Rasa's library had first been raised, Bloxham had several times planned to perform the duty he'd volunteered himself for and go into the bowels of the tower to check on the security of the collection. But he'd twice put off the task, telling himself that there were more urgent claims on his time: specifically, the organization of the Society's Great Purge. He might have postponed a third time had the matter not been raised again, this in a casual aside from Charlotte Feaver, who'd been equally vociferous about the safety of the books at that first gathering and now offered to accompany him on the investigation. Women baffled Bloxham, and the attraction they exercised over him had always to be set beside the discomfort he felt in their company, but in recent days he'd felt an intensity of s.e.xual need he'd seldom, if ever, experienced before. Not even in the privacy of his own prayers did he dare confess the reason. The Purge excited him-it roused his blood and his manhood-and he had no doubt that Charlotte had responded to this heat, even though he'd made no outward show of it. He promptly accepted her offer, and at her suggestion they agreed to meet at the tower on the last evening of the old year. He brought a bottle of champagne.

"We may as well enjoy ourselves," he said, as they headed down through the remains of Roxborough's original house, a floor of which had been preserved and concealed within the plainer walls of the tower.

Neither of them had ventured into this underworld for many years. It was more primitive than either of them remembered. Electric light had been crudely installed-cables from which bare bulbs hung looped along the pa.s.sages-but otherwise the place was just as it had been in the first years of the Tabula Rasa. The cellars had been built for the express purpose of housing the Society's collection; thus for the millennium. A fan of identical corridors spread from the bottom stairs, lined on both sides with shelves that rose up the brick walls to the curve of the ceilings. The intersections were elaborately vaulted, but otherwise there was no decoration.

"Shall we break open the bottle before we start?" Bloxham suggested.

"Why not? What are we drinking from?"

His reply was to bring two fluted gla.s.ses from his pocket. She claimed them from him while he opened the bottle, its cork coming with no more than a decorous sigh, the sound of which carried away through the labyrinth and failed to return. Gla.s.ses filled, they drank to the Purge.

"Now we're here," Charlotte said, pulling her furs up around her, "what are we looking for?"

"Any sign of tampering or theft," Bloxham said. "Shall we split up or go together?"

"Oh, together," she replied.

It had been Roxborough's claim that these shelves carried every single volume of any significance in the hemisphere, and as they wandered together, surveying the tens of thousands of ma.n.u.scripts and books, it was easy to believe the boast.

"How in h.e.l.l's name do you suppose they gathered all this stuff up?" Charlotte wondered as they walked.

"I daresay the world was smaller then," Bloxham remarked. "They all knew each other, didn't they? Casanova, Sartori, the Comte de Saint-Germain. All fakes and b.u.g.g.e.rs together."

"Fakes? Do you really think so?"

"Most of them," Bloxham said, wallowing in the ill-deserved role of expert. "There may have been one or two, I suppose, who knew what they were doing."

"Have you ever been tempted?" Charlotte asked him, slipping her arm through the crook of his as they went.

"To do what?"

"To see if any of it's worth a d.a.m.n. To try raising a familiar or crossing into the Dominions."

He looked at her with genuine astonishment. "That's against every precept of the Society," he said.