Imajica. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ we even sure the library’s intact?’ Charlotte went on. ‘How do we know books haven’t been stolen?’

      ‘Who by?’ said Bloxham.

      ‘By Dowd, for one. They’ve never been properly catalogued. I know that Leash woman attempted it, but we all know what happened to her.’

      The tale of the Leash woman was one of the Society’s lesser shames: a catalogue of accidents that had ended in tragedy. In essence, the obsessive Clare Leash had taken it upon herself to make a full account of the volumes in the Society’s possession, and had suffered a stroke while doing so. She’d lain for two days on the cellar floor. By the time she was discovered, she was barely alive, and quite without her wits. She’d survived, however, and eleven years later was still a resident in a hospice in Sussex, witless as ever.

      ‘It still shouldn’t be that difficult to find out if the place has been tampered with,’ Charlotte said.

      Bloxham agreed. ‘That should be looked into,’ he said.

      ‘I take it you’re volunteering,’ said McGann.

      ‘And if they didn’t get their information from downstairs,’ Charlotte said, ‘there are other sources. We don’t believe we have every last book dealing with the Imajica in our hands - do we?’

      ‘No, of course not,’ said McGann. ‘But the Society’s broken the back of the tradition over the years. The cults in this country aren’t worth a damn, we all know that. They cobble workings together from whatever they can scrape up. It’s all piecemeal. Senseless. None of them have the wherewithal to conceive of a Reconciliation. Most of them don’t even know what the Imajica is. They’re putting hexes on their bosses at the bank.’

      Godolphin had heard similar speeches for years. Talk of magic in the Western World as a spent force; self-congratulatory accounts of cults that had been infiltrated, and discovered to be groups of pseudo-scientists exchanging arcane theories in a language no two of them agreed upon, or sexual obsessives using the excuse of workings to demand favours they couldn’t seduce from their partners or, most often, crazies in search of some mythology, however ludicrous, to keep them from complete psychosis. But amongst the fakes, obsessives and lunatics, was there perhaps a man who instinctively knew the route to the Imajica? A natural Maestro, born with something in his genes that made him capable of re-inventing the workings of the Reconciliation? Until now the possibility hadn’t occurred to Godolphin - he’d been too preoccupied by the secret that he’d lived with most of his adult life - but it was an intriguing, and disturbing, thought.

      ‘I believe we should take the risk seriously,’ he pronounced. ‘However unlikely we think it is.’

      ‘What risk?’ McGann said.

      ‘That there is a Maestro out there. Somebody who understands our forefathers’ ambition and is going to find his own way of repeating the experiment. Maybe he doesn’t want the books. Maybe he doesn’t need the books. Maybe he’s sitting at home somewhere, even now, working out the problems for himself.’

      ‘So what do we do?’ said Charlotte.

      ‘We purge,’ said Shales. ‘It pains me to say it, but Godolphin’s right. We don’t know what’s going on out there. We keep an eye on things from a distance, and we occasionally arrange to have somebody put under permanent sedation, but we don’t purge. I think we’ve got to begin.’

      ‘How do we go about that?’ Bloxham wanted to know. He had a zealot’s gleam in his dishwater eyes.

      ‘We’ve got our allies. We use them. We turn over every stone, and if we find anything we don’t like, we kill it.’

      ‘We’re not an assassination squad.’

      ‘We have the finance to hire one,’ Shales pointed out. ‘And the friends to cover the evidence if need be. As I see it, we have one responsibility: to prevent, at all costs, another attempt at Reconciliation. That’s what we were born to do.’

      He spoke with a total lack of melodrama, as though he were reciting a shopping list. His detachment impressed the room. So did the last sentiment, however blandly it was presented. Who could fail to be stirred by the thought of such purpose, reaching back over generations to the men who had gathered on this spot two centuries before? A few bloodied survivors, swearing that they, and their children, and their children’s children, and so on until the end of the world, would live and die with one ambition burning in their hearts: the prevention of another such apocalypse.

      At this juncture McGann suggested a vote, and one was taken. There were no dissenting voices. The Society was agreed that the way forward lay in a comprehensive purge of all elements - innocent or not - who might presently be tampering, or tempted to tamper, with rituals intended to gain access to so-called Reconciled Dominions. All conventional religious structures would be excluded from this sanction, as they were utterly ineffectual, and presented a useful distraction for some souls who might have been tempted towards esoteric practices. The shams and the profiteers would also be passed over. The pier-end palmists and fake psychics, the spiritualists who wrote new concertos for dead composers, and sonnets for poets long since dust - all these would be left untouched. It was only those who stood a chance of tripping over something Imajical, and acting upon it, that would be rooted out. It would be an extensive and sometimes brutal business, but the Society was the equal of the challenge. This was not the first purge it had masterminded (though it would be the first of this scale); the structure was in place for an invisible but comprehensive cleansing. The cults would be the prime targets: their acolytes would be dispersed, their leaders bought off or incarcerated. It had happened before that England had been sluiced clean of every significant esoteric and thaumaturgist. Now it would happen again.

      ‘Is the business of the day concluded?’ Oscar asked. ‘Only Mass calls me.’

      ‘What’s to be done with the body?’ Alice Tyrwhitt asked.

      Godolphin had his answer ready and waiting.

      ‘It’s my mess and I’ll clear it up,’ he said, with due humility. ‘I can arrange to have it buried in a motorway tonight, unless anybody has a better idea?’

      There were no objections. ‘Just as long as it’s out of here,’ Alice said.

      ‘I’ll need some help to wrap it up and get it down to the car. Bloxham, would you oblige?’

      Reluctant to refuse, Bloxham went in search of something to contain the carcass.

      ‘I see no reason for us to sit and watch,’ Charlotte said, rising from her seat. ‘If that’s the night’s business, I’m going home.’

      As she headed to the door, Oscar took his cue to sow one last, triumphant mischief.

      ‘I suppose we’ll be all thinking the same thing tonight,’ he said.

      ‘What’s that?’ Lionel asked.

      ‘Oh, just that if these things are as good at imitation as they appear to be, then we can’t entirely trust each other from now on. I’m assuming we’re all still human at the moment, but who knows what Christmas will bring?’

      Half an hour later, Oscar was ready to depart for Mass. For all his earlier squeamishness, Bloxham had done well, returning Dowd’s guts into the bowel of the carcass, and mummifying СКАЧАТЬ