Galilee. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ shining. My mouth was suddenly parched; I could barely speak.

      “I want…”

      “I know,” she said softly. “I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back.”

      “Yes…” I said. I was close to sobbing.

      “But here it is,” she said. “All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it’s yours.”

      “No,” I protested. “I’ve never been in this place before.”

      “But it’s been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were bom.”

      “Dreamed it into me…” I said.

      “Every sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come…it’s in your blood and in your bowels.”

      “Then why am I so afraid of it?”

      “Because you’ve held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you’re the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you…”

      Did I dare believe any of this?

      Cesaria replied as though she’d heard the doubt spoken aloud.

      “I can’t reassure you,” she said. “Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you’ve ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again.”

      “Fall where?”

      “Why back into your own hands, of course,” she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn’t blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I’d never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that: I was afraid.

      “Ask your question,” Cesaria said. “You have a question. Ask it.”

      “It sounds so childish.”

      “Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it.”

      “Am I…safe?”

      “Safe?”

      “Yes. Safe.”

      “In your flesh? No. I can’t guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there’s other hands to hold you. I’ve told you that already.”

      “And…I think I believe you,” I said.

      “So then,” Cesaria said, “you have no reason not to let the memories come.”

      She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.

      “Touch me,” she said.

      I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.

      “Don’t be afraid,” she said to me. “They don’t bite.”

      I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn’t bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn’t realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can’t imagine how that’s possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.

      I don’t believe I had ever stood so close to my father’s wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush and forbidding. Strands of her hair were lifted by gusts off the blaze around us (to the heat of which I seemed invulnerable) and brushed against my cheek. Their touch, though it was light, was nevertheless profoundly sensual. Feeling it, and seeing her exquisite features, I could not help but imagine what it would be like to be received into her arms. To kiss her, to lie with her, to put a child into her. It was little wonder my father had obsessed on her to his dying day, though all manner of argument and disappointment had soured the love between them.

      “So now…” she said.

      “Yes?” I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.

      “Take it back…” she said.

      I didn’t comprehend what she was telling me. ‘Take what back?” I said.

      “The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back.”

      I understood. It was time to repossess all that I’d attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I’d hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.

       “Take it back.”

      I wanted to beg a few moments’ grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.

      “Take it back,” she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat and lungs in an instant.

      My head reeled; white blotches burnt at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.

      The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up—hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.

      What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I’d first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father’s wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.

      All of the events that had just unfolded might have seemed a fiction but for one simple fact: I was still standing. Whatever СКАЧАТЬ