Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

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THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

Clive Barker

PART ONE:

THE MESSENGER

Homer opened the door.

"Come on in, Randolph. "

Jaffe hated the way he said Randolph, with the faintest trace of contempt in the word, as though he

knew every damn crime Jaffe had ever committed, right from the first, the littlest.

"What are you waiting for?" Homer said, seeing Jaffe linger. "You've got work to do. The sooner

it's started, the sooner I can find you more. "

Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious yellow and battleship gray

as every other office and corridor in the Omaha Central Post Office. Not that much of the walls was

visible. Piled higher than head-height on every side was mail. Sacks, satchels, boxes and carts of it,

spilling out onto the cold concrete floor.

"Dead letters, " Homer said. "Stuff even the good ol' U.S. Post Office can't deliver. Quite a sight,

huh?"

Jaffe was agog, but he made sure not to show it. He made sure to show nothing, especially to wise

guys like Homer.

"This is all yours, Randolph, " his superior said. "Your little corner of heaven. "

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Jaffe said.

"Sort it. Open it, look for any important stuff so we don't end up putting good money in the furnace.

"There's money in them?"

"Some of "em," Homer said with a smirk. "Maybe. But most of it's just junk-mail. Stuff people

don't want and just put back in the system. Some of it's had the wrong address put on and it's been

flying backwards and forwards till it ends up in Nebraska. Don't ask me why, but whenever they

don't know what to do with this shit they send it to Omaha."

"It's the middle of the country," Jaffe observed. "Gateway to the West. Or East. Depending on

which way you're facing."

"Ain't the dead center," Homer countered. "But we still end up with all the crap. And it's all got to

get sorted. By band. By you."

"All of it?" Jaffe said. What was in front of him was two weeks', three weeks', four weeks' work.

"ALL of it," said Homer, and didn't make any attempt to conceal his satisfaction. "All yours. You'll

soon get the hang of it. If the envelope's got some kind of government marking, put it in the burn

pile. Don't even bother to open it. Fuck 'em, right? But the rest, open. You never know what we're

going to find." He grinned conspiratorially. "And what we find, we share," he said.

Jaffe had been working for the U.S. Post Office only nine days, but that was long enough, easily

long enough, to know that a lot of mail was intercepted by its hired deliverers. Packets were

razored open and their contents filched, checks were cashed, love-letters were laughed over.

"I'm going to be coming back in here on a regular basis," Homer warned. "So don't you try hiding

anything from me. I got a nose for stuff. I know when there's bills in an envelope, and I know when

there's a thief on the team. Hear me? I got a sixth sense. So don't you try anything clever, bud,

'cause me and the boys don't take kindly to that. And you want to be one of the team, don't you?"

He put a wide, heavy hand on Jaffe's shoulder. "Share and share alike, right?"

"I hear," Jaffe said.

"Good," Homer replied. "So—" He opened his arms to the spectacle of piled sacks. "It's all yours."

He sniffed, grinned and took his leave.

One of the team, Jaffe thought as the door clicked closed, was what he'd never be. Not that he was

about to tell Homer that. He'd let the man patronize him; play the willing slave. But in his heart? In

his heart, he had other plans, other ambitions. Problem was, he wasn't any closer to realizing those

ambitions than he'd been at twenty. Now he was thirty-seven, going on thirty-eight. Not the kind of

man women looked at more than once. Not the kind of character folks found exactly charismatic.

Losing his hair the way his father had. Bald at forty, most likely. Bald, and wifeless, and not more

than beer-change in his pocket because he'd never been able to hold down a job for more than a

year, eighteen months at the outside, so he'd never risen higher than private in the ranks.

He tried not to think about it too hard, because when he did he began to get really itchy to do some

harm, and a lot of the time it was harm done to himself. It would be so easy. A gun in the mouth,

tickling the back of his throat. Over and done with. No note. No explanation. What would he write

anyway? I'm killing myself because I didn't get to be King of the World? Ridiculous.

But...that was what he wanted to be. He'd never known how, he'd never even had a sniff of the way,

but that was the ambition that had nagged him from the first. Other men rose from nothing, didn't

they? Messiahs, presidents, movie stars. They pulled themselves up out of the mud the way the

fishes had when they'd decided to go for a walk. Grown legs, breathed air, become more than what

they'd been. If fucking fishes could do it, why couldn't he? But it had to be soon. Before he was

forty. Before he was bald. Before he was dead, and gone, and no one to even remember him, except

maybe as a nameless asshole who'd spent three weeks in the winter of 1969 in a room full of dead

letters, opening orphaned mail looking for dollar bills. Some epitaph.

He sat down and looked at the task heaped before him.

"Fuck you," he said. Meaning Homer. Meaning the sheer volume of crap in front of him. But most

of all, meaning himself.

At first, it was drudgery. Pure hell, day after day, going through the sacks.

The piles didn't seem to diminish. Indeed they were several times fed by a leering Homer, who led

a trail of peons in with further satchels to swell the number.

First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed) from dull; then the private

correspondence from official, and the scrawl from the Palmer method. Those decisions made, he

began opening the envelopes, in the first week with his fingers, till his fingers became calloused,

thereafter with a short-bladed knife he bought especially for the purpose, digging out the contents

like a pearl-fisher in search of a pearl, most of the time finding nothing, sometimes, as Homer had

promised, finding money or a check, which he dutifully declared to his boss.

"You're good at this," Homer said after the second week. "You're really good. Maybe I should put

you on this full time."

Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he'd said that too many times to bosses who'd fired him the

minute after, and he couldn't afford to lose this job: not with the rent to pay and heating his one-

room apartment costing a damn fortune while the snow continued to fall. Besides, something was

happening to him while he passed the solitary hours in the Dead Letter Room, something it took

him to the end of the third week to begin to enjoy, and the end of the fifth to comprehend.

He was sitting at the crossroads of America.

Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn't the geographical center of the USA, but as far as

the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.

The lines of communication crossed, and recrossed, and finally dropped their orphans here, because

nobody in any other state wanted them. These letters had been sent from coast to coast looking for

someone to open them, and had found no takers. Finally they'd ended with him: with Randolph

Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken and rage not expressed, whose little

knife slit them, and little eyes scanned them, and who—sitting at his crossroads—began to see the

private face of the nation.

There were love-letters, hate-letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets on which men had drawn

round their hard-ons, valentines of pubic hair, blackmail by wives, journalists, hustlers, lawyers and

senators, junk-mail and suicide notes, lost novels, chain letters, resumes, undelivered gifts, rejected

gifts, letters sent out into the wilderness like bottles from an island, in the hope of finding help,

poems, threats and recipes. So much. But these many were the least of it. Though sometimes the

love-letters got him sweaty, and the ransom notes made him wonder if, having gone unanswered,

their senders had murdered their hostages, the stories of, love and death they told touched him only

fleetingly. Far more persuasive, far more moving, was another story, which could not be articulated

so easily.

Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a secret life; one which he'd

never even glimpsed before. Love and death he knew about. Love and death were the great clichés;

the twin obsessions of songs and soap operas. But there was another life, which every fortieth

letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every thousandth stated with a lunatic plainness.

When they said it plain, it was not the whole truth, but it was a beginning, and each of the writers

had their own mad way of stating something close to un-stateable.

What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not remotely as it seemed. Forces

conspired (governmental, religious, medical) to conceal and silence those who had more than a

passing grasp of that fact, but they couldn't gag or incarcerate every one of them. There were men

and women who slipped the nets, however widely flung; who found back-roads to travel where

their pursuers got lost, and safe houses along the way where they'd be fed and watered by like

visionaries, ready to misdirect the dogs when they came sniffing. These people didn't trust Ma Bell,

so they didn't use telephones. They didn't dare assemble in groups of more than two for fear of

attracting attention to themselves. But they wrote. Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the

secrets they kept sealed up were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they

knew the hunters were on their heels and they'd have no other chance to describe the world to itself

before they were caught, drugged and locked up. Sometimes there was even a subversive glee in

the scrawlings, sent out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the hope that the letter would blow

the mind of some innocent who'd received it by chance. Some of the missives were stream-of-

consciousness rantings, others precise, even clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside

out by sex-magic or mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National Enquirer

stories to veil another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zombie cults; news from

Venusian evangelists and psychics who tuned in to the dead on the TV. But after a few weeks of

studying these letters (and study it was; he was like a man locked in the ultimate library) Jaffe

began to see beyond the nonsenses to the hidden story. He broke the code; or enough of it to be

tantalized. Instead of being irritated each day when Homer opened the door and had another half

dozen satchels of letters brought in, he welcomed the addition. The more letters, the more clues; the

more clues the more hope he had of a solution to the mystery. It was, he became more certain as the

weeks turned into months and the winter mellowed, not several mysteries but one. The writers

whose letters were about the Veil, and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward

towards revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but somewhere in the

cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.

It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor about death, as a literalist

would have understood the term. It was—in no particular order—something to do with fishes, and

the sea (sometimes the Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about

dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known all along was some other

place. It was about the end of the World, which was in turn about its beginning. And it was about

Art.

Or rather, the Art.

That, of all the codes, was the one he beat his head hardest against, and broke only his brow. The

Art was talked about in many ways. As The Final Great Work. As The Forbidden Fruit. As da

Vinci's Despair or The Finger in the Pie or The Butt-Digger's Glee. There were many ways to

describe it, but only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.

"So, are you happy here?" Homer said to him one May day.

Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him. His skin, which had never

been too healthy, was as pale and etched upon as the pages in his hand.

"Sure," he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. "Have you got some more for

me?"

Homer didn't answer at first. Then he said: "What are you hiding, Jaffe?"

"Hiding? I'm not hiding anything."

"You're stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us."

"No I'm not," Jaffe said. He'd been meticulous in obeying Homer's first edict, that anything found

among the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewelry he'd come

across once in a while; it all went to Homer, to be divided up. "You get everything," he said. "I

swear."

Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. "You spend every fucking hour of the day down here,"

he said. "You don't talk with the other guys. You don't drink with 'em. Don't you like the smell of

us, Randolph? Is that it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Or are you just a thief?"

"I'm no thief," Jaffe said. "You can look for yourself." He stood up, raising his hands, a letter in

each. "Search me."

"I don't want to fucking touch you," came Homer's response. "What do you think I am, a fucking

fag?" He kept staring at Jaffe. After a pause he said: "I'm going to have somebody else come down

here and take over. You've done five months. It's long enough. I'm going to move you."

"I don't want—"

"What?"

"I mean...what I mean to say is, I'm quite happy down here. Really. It's work I like doing."

"Yeah," said Homer, clearly still suspicious. "Well from Monday you're out."

"Why?"

"Because I say so! If you don't like it find yourself another job."

"I'm doing good work, aren't I?" Jaffe said.

Homer was already turning his back.

"It smells in here," he said as he exited. "Smells real bad."

There was a word Randolph had learned from his reading which he'd never known before:

synchronicity. He'd had to go buy a dictionary to look it up, and found it meant that sometimes

events coincided. The way the letter writers used the word it usually meant that there was

something significant, mysterious, maybe even miraculous in the way one circumstance collided

with another, as though a pattern existed that was just out of human sight.

Such a collision occurred the day Homer dropped his bombshell, an intersecting of events that

would change every-thing. No more than an hour after Homer had left, Jaffe took his short-bladed

knife, which was getting blunt, to an envelope that felt heavier than most. He slit it open, and out

fell a small medallion. It hit the concrete floor: a sweet ringing sound. He picked it up, with fingers

that had been trembling since Homer's exit. There was no chain attached to the medallion, nor did it

have a loop for that purpose. Indeed it wasn't attractive enough to be hung around a woman's neck

as a piece of jewelry, and though it was in the form of a cross closer inspection proved it not to be

of Christian design. Its four arms were of equal length, the full span no more than an inch and a

half. At the intersection was a human figure, neither male nor female, arms outstretched as in a

crucifixion, but not nailed. Spreading out along the four routes were abstract designs, each of which

ended in a circle. The face was very simply rendered. It bore, he thought, the subtlest of smiles.

He was no expert on metallurgy, but it was apparent the thing was not gold or silver. Even if the

dirt had been cleaned from it he doubted it would ever gleam. But there was something deeply

attractive about it nevertheless. Looking at it he had the sense he'd sometimes had waking in the

morning from an intense dream but unable to remember the details. This was a significant object,

but he didn't know why. Were the sigils spreading from the figure vaguely familiar from one of the

letters he'd read, perhaps? He'd scanned thousands upon thousands in the last twenty weeks, and

many of them had carried little sketches, obscene sometimes, often indecipherable. Those he'd

judged the most interesting he'd smuggled out of the Post Office, to study at night. They were

bundled up beneath the bed in his room. Perhaps he'd break the dream-code on the medallion by-

careful examination of those.

He decided to take lunch that day with the rest of the workers, figuring it'd be best to do as little as

possible to irritate Homer any further. It was a mistake. In the company of the good ol' boys talking

about news he'd not listened to in months, and the quality of last night's steak, and the fuck they'd

had, or failed to have, after the steak, and what the summer was going to bring, he felt himself a

total stranger. They knew it too. They talked with their backs half-turned to him, dropping their

voices at times to whisper about his weird look, his wild eyes. The more they shunned him the

more he felt happy to be shunned, because they knew, even fuckwits like these knew, he was

different from them. Maybe they were even a little afraid.

He couldn't bring himself to go back to the Dead Letter Room at one-thirty. The medallion and its

mysterious signs was burning a hole in his pocket. He had to go back to his lodgings and start the

search through his private library of letters now. Without even wasting breath telling Homer, he did

just that.

It was a brilliant, sunny day. He drew the curtains against the invasion of light, turned on the lamp

with the yellow shade, and there, in a jaundiced fever, began his study, taping the letters with any

trace of illustration to the bare walls, and when the walls were full spreading them on the table, bed,

chair and floor. Then he went from sheet to sheet, sign to sign, looking for anything that even

faintly resembled the medallion in his hand. And as he went, the same thought kept creeping back

into his head: that he knew there was an Art, but no Artist, a practice but no practitioner, and that

maybe he was that man.

The thought didn't have to creep for long. Within an hour of perusing the letters it had pride of

place in his skull. The medallion hadn't fallen into his hands by accident. It had come to him as a

reward for his patient study, and as a way to draw together the threads of his investigation and

finally begin to make some sense of it. Most of the symbols and sketches on the pages were

irrelevant, but there were many, too many to be a coincidence, that echoed images on the cross. No

more than two ever appeared on the same sheet, and most of these were crude renderings, because

none of the writers had the complete solution in their hands the way he did, but they'd all

comprehended some part of the jigsaw, and their observations about the part they had, whether

haiku, dirty talk or alchemical formulas, gave him a better grasp of the system behind the symbols.

A term that had cropped up regularly in the most perceptive of the letters was the Shoal. He'd

passed over it several times in his reading, and never thought much about it. There was a good deal

of evolutionary talk in the letters, and he'd assumed the term to be a part of that. Now he

understood his error. The Shoal was a cult, or a church of some kind, and its symbol was the object

he held in the palm of his hand. What it and the Art had to do with each other was by no means

clear, but his long-held suspicion that this was one mystery, one journey, was here confirmed, and

he knew that with the medallion as a map he'd find his way from Shoal to Art eventually.

In the meantime there was a more urgent concern. When he thought back to the tribe of co-workers,

with Homer at its head, he shuddered to think that any of them might ever share the secret he'd

uncovered. Not that they had any chance of making any real progress decoding it: they were too

witless. But Homer was suspicious enough to at least sniff along the trail a little way, and the idea

of anybody—but especially the boorish Homer—tainting this sacred ground was unbearable. There

was only one way to prevent such a disaster. He had to act quickly to destroy any evidence that

might put Homer on the right track. The medallion he'd keep, of course: he'd been entrusted with it

by higher powers, those faces he'd one day get to see. He'd also keep the twenty of thirty letters that

had proffered the best information on the Shoal; the rest (three hundred or so) had to be burned. As

to the collection in the Dead Letter Room, they had to go into the furnace too. All of them. It would

take time, but it had to be done, and the sooner the better. He made a selection of the letters in his

room, parcelled up those he didn't need to keep, and headed off back to the Sorting Office.

It was late afternoon now, and he travelled against the flow of human traffic, entering the Office by

the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man's routine well enough to suspect he'd

punched out at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer somewhere. The furnace

was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling antique, called Miller, with whom

Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being stone-deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to

explain that he was going to be feeding the furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel

he'd brought from home, which he immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the

Dead Letter Room.

Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe's chair under a bare bulb, going

through the piles around him.

"So what's the scam?" he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.

It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had carved knowledge

into his face. He couldn't pass for a naïf any longer. Nor—now that it came to it—did he want to.

"No scam," he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man's puerile suspicions plain. "I'm not

taking anything you'd want. Or could use."

"I'll be the judge of that, asshole," Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining down among

the rest of the litter. "I want to know what you've been up to down here. 'Sides jerking off."

Jaffe closed the door. He'd never realized it before, but the reverberations of the furnace carried

through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The sacks, the envelopes, the

words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer was sitting. And the knife, the

short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair on which Homer was sitting. The whole place

was moving, ever so slightly, like there was a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be

flipped.

Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his way to

some throne or other. He didn't know which and he didn't know where, but he needed to silence any

pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame him, or judge him,

or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.

"I should explain..." he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, "...what the scam

really is."

"Yeah," Homer said, his lip curling. "Why don't you do that?"

"Well it's real simple..."

He started to walk towards Homer, and the chair, and the knife beside the chair. The speed of his

approach made Homer nervous, but he kept his seat.

"...I've found a secret," Jaffe went on.

"Huh?"

"You want to know what it is?"

Now Homer stood up, his gaze trembling the way everything else was. Everything except Jaffe. All

the tremors had gone out of his hands, his guts and his head. He was steady in an unsteady world.

"I don't know what the fuck you're doing," Homer said. But I don't like it."

"I don't blame you," Jaffe said. He didn't have his eyes on the knife. He didn't need to. He could

sense it. "But it's your job to know, isn't it?" Jaffe went on, "what's been going on down here."

Homer took several steps away from the chair. The loutish gait he liked to affect had gone. He was

stumbling, as though the floor was tilting.

"I've been sitting at the center of the world," Jaffe said. "This little room...this is where it's all

happening."

"Is that right?"

"Damn right."

Homer made a nervous little grin. He threw a glance towards the door.

"You want to go?" Jaffe said.

"Yeah." He looked at his watch, not seeing it. "Got to run. Only came down here—"

"You're afraid of me," Jaffe said. "And you should be. I'm not the man I was."

"Is that right?"

"You said that already."

Again, Homer looked towards the door. It was five paces away; four if he ran. He'd covered half

the distance when Jaffe picked up the knife. He had the door handle clasped when he heard the man

approaching behind him.

He glanced round, and the knife came straight at his eye. It wasn't an accidental stab. It was

synchronicity. His eye glinted, the knife glinted. Glints collided, and the next moment he was

screaming as he fell back against the door, Randolph following him to claim the letter-opener from

the man's head.

The roar of the furnace got louder. With his back to the sacks Jaffe could feel the envelopes

nestling against each other, the words being shaken on the pages, till they became a glorious poetry.

Blood, it said; like a sea; his thoughts like clots in that sea, dark, congealed, hotter than hot.

He reached for the handle of the knife, and clenched it. Never before in his life had he shed blood;

not even squashed a bug, at least intentionally. But now his fist on the hot wet handle seemed

wonderful. A prophecy; a proof.

Grinning, he pulled the knife out of Homer's socket, and before his victim could slide down the

door stuck it into Homer's throat to the hilt. This time he didn't let it lie. He pulled it out as soon as

he'd stopped Homer's screams, and he stabbed the middle of the man's chest. There was bone there,

and he had to drive hard, but he was suddenly very strong. Homer gagged, and blood came out of

his mouth, and from the wound in his throat. Jaffe pulled the knife out. He didn't stab again. Instead

he wiped the blade on his handkerchief and turned from the body to think about his next move. If

he tried to lug the sacks of mail to the furnace he risked being discovered, and sublime as he felt,

high on the boor-slob's demise, he was still aware that there was danger in being found out. It

would be better to bring the furnace here. After all, fire was a moveable feast. All it required was a

light, and Homer had those. He turned back to the slumped corpse and searched in the pockets for a

box of matches. Finding one, he pulled it out, and went over to the satchels.

Sadness surprised him as he prepared to put a flame to the dead letters. He'd spent so many weeks

here, lost in a kind of delirium, drunk with mysteries. This was good-bye to all that. After this—

Homer dead, the letters burnt—he was a fugitive, a man without a history, beckoned by an Art he

knew nothing about, but which he wished more than anything to practice.

He began to screw up a few of the pages, to provide some initial fodder for the flame. Once begun,

he didn't doubt that the fire would sustain itself: there was nothing in the room— paper, fabric,

flesh—that wasn't combustible. With three heaps of paper made, he struck a match. The flame was

bright, and looking at it he realized how much he hated brightness. The dark was so much more

interesting; full of secrets, full of threats. He put the flame to the piles of paper and watched while

the fires gained strength. Then he repeated to the door.

Homer was slumped against it, of course, bleeding from three places, and his bulk wasn't that easy

to move, but Jaffe put his back into the task, his shadow thrown up against the wall by the

burgeoning bonfire behind him. Even in the half minute it took him to move the corpse aside the

heat grew exponentially, so that by the time he glanced back at the room it was ablaze from side to

side, the heat stirring up its own wind, which in turn fanned the flames.

It was only when he was clearing out his room of any sign of himself—eradicating every trace of

Randolph Ernest Jaffe—that he regretted doing what he'd done. Not the burning—that had been

altogether wise—but leaving Homer's body in the room to be consumed along with the dead letters.

He should have taken a more elaborate revenge, he realized. He should have hacked the body into

pieces, packaged it up, tongue, eyes, testicles, guts, skin, skull, divided piece from piece—and sent

the pieces out into the system with scrawled addresses that made no real sense, so that chance (or

synchronicity) was allowed to elect the doorstep on which Homer's flesh would land. The mailman

mailed. He promised himself not to miss such ironic possibilities in the future.

The task of clearing his room didn't take long; He had very few belongings, and most of what he

had meant little to him. When it came down to basics, he barely existed. He was the sum of a few

dollars, a few photographs, a few clothes. Nothing that couldn't be put in a small suitcase and still

leave room alongside them for a set of encyclopedias.

By midnight, with that same small suitcase in hand, he was on his way out of Omaha, and ready for

a journey that might lead in any direction. Gateway to the East, Gateway to the West. He didn't care

which way he went, as long as the route led to the Art.

JAFFE had lived a small life. Born within fifty miles of Omaha, he'd been educated there, he'd

buried his parents there, he'd courted and failed to persuade to the altar two women of that city.

He'd left the state a few times, and even thought (after the second of his failed courtships) of

retreating to Orlando, where his sister lived, but she'd persuaded him against it, saying he wouldn't

get on with the people, or the incessant sun. So he'd stayed in Omaha, losing jobs and getting

others, never committing himself to anything or anybody for very long, and in turn not being

committed to.

But in the solitary confinement of the Dead Letter Room he'd had a taste of horizons he'd never

known existed, and it had given him an appetite for the open road. When there'd only been sun,

suburbs and Mickey Mouse out there he'd not given a damn. Why bother to go looking for such

banalities? But now he knew better. There were mysteries to be unveiled, and powers to be seized,

and when he was King of the World he'd pull down the suburbs (and the sun if he could) and make

the world over in a hot darkness where a man might finally get to know the secrets of his own soul.

There'd been much talk in the letters about crossroads, and for a long time he'd taken the image

literally, thinking that in Omaha he was probably at that crossroads, and that knowledge of the Art

would come to him there. But once out of the city, and away, he saw the error of such literalism.

When the writers had spoken of crossroads they hadn't meant one highway intersecting with

another. They'd meant places where states of being crossed, where the human system met the alien,

and both moved on, changed. In the flow and flurry of such places there was hope of finding

revelation.

He had very little money, of course, but that didn't seem to matter. In the weeks that followed his

escape from the scene of his crime, all that he wanted simply came to him. He had only to stick out

his thumb and a car squealed to a halt. When a driver asked him where he was headed, and he said

he was headed as far as he, Jaffe, wanted to go, that was exactly as far as the driver took him. It was

as if he was blessed. When he stumbled, there was someone to pick him up. When he got hungry,

there was someone to feed him.

It was a woman in Illinois, who'd given him a lift then asked him if he wanted to stay the night with

her, who confirmed his blessedness.

"You've seen something extraordinary, haven't you?" she whispered to him in the middle of the

night. "It's in your eyes. It was your eyes made me offer you the lift."

"And offer me this?" he said, fingering between her legs.

"Yes. That too," she said. "What have you seen?"

"Not enough," he replied.

"Will you make love to me again?"

"No."

Every now and then, moving from state to state, he got a glimpse of what the letters had schooled

him in. He saw the secrets peeping out, only daring to show themselves because he was passing

through and they knew him as a coming man of power. In Kentucky he chanced to witness the

corpse of an adolescent being hauled from a river, the body left sprawled on the grass, arms spread,

fingers spread, while a woman howled and sobbed beside it. The boy's eyes were open; so were the

buttons of his trousers. Watching from a short distance, the only witness not to be ordered away by

the cops (the eyes, again) he took a moment to savor the way the boy was arrayed, like the figure

on the medallion, and half wanted to throw himself into the river just for the thrill of drowning. In

Idaho, he met a man who'd lost an arm in an automobile accident and while they sat and drank

together he explained that he still had feeling in the lost limb, which the doctors said was just a

phantom in his nervous system, but which he knew was his astral body, still complete on another

plane of being. He said he jerked off with his lost hand regularly, and offered to demonstrate. It was

true. Later, the man said:

"You can see in the dark, can't you?" Jaffe hadn't thought about it, but now that his attention ss

drawn to the fact it seemed he could.

"How'd you learn to do that?"

"I didn't."

"Astral eyes, maybe."

"Maybe."

"You want me to suck your cock again?"

"No."

He was gathering up experiences, one of each, passing through people's lives and out the other side

leaving them obsessed or dead or weeping. He indulged his every whim, going wherever instinct

pointed, the secret life coming to find him the moment he arrived in town.

There was no sign of pursuit from the forces of law. Perhaps Homer's body had never been found in

the gutted building, or if it had the police had assumed he was simply a victim of the fire. For

whatever reason, nobody came sniffing after him. He went wherever he wanted and did whatever

he desired, until he'd had a surfeit of desires satisfied and wants supplied, and it came time for him

to push himself over the brink.

He came to rest in a roach-ridden motel in Los Alamos, New Mexico, locked himself in with two

bottles of vodka, stripped, closed the curtains against the day, and let his mind go. He hadn't eaten

in forty-eight hours, not because he didn't have money, he did, but because he enjoyed the light-

headedness. Starved of sustenance, and whipped up by vodka, his thoughts ran riot, devouring

themselves and shitting each other out, barbaric and baroque by turns. The roaches came out in the

darkness, and ran over his body as he lay on the floor. He let them come and go, pouring vodka on

his groin when they got too busy there, and made him hard, which was a distraction. He wanted

only to think. To float and think.

He'd had all he needed of the physical; felt hot and cold, sexy and sexless; fucked and fucker. He

wanted none of that again: at least not as Randolph Jaffe. There was another way to be, another

place to feel from, where sex and murder and grief and hunger and all of it might be interesting

again, but that would not be until he'd got beyond his present condition; become an Artist; remade

the world.

Just before dawn, with even the roaches sluggish, he felt the invitation.

A great calm was in him. His heart was slow and steady. His bladder emptied of its own accord,

like a baby's. He was neither too hot nor too cold. Neither too sleepy nor too awake. And at that

crossroads—which was not the first, nor would be the last—something tugged on his gut, and

summoned him.

He got up immediately, dressed, took the full bottle of vodka that remained, and went out walking.

The invitation didn't leave his innards. It kept tugging as the cold night lifted and the sun began to

rise. He'd come barefoot. His feet bled, but his body wasn't of great interest to him, and he kept the

discomfort at bay with further helpings of vodka. By noon, the last of the drink gone, he was in the

middle of the desert, just walking in the direction he was called, barely aware of one foot moving

ahead of the other. There were no thoughts in his head now, except the Art and its getting, and even

that ambition came and went.

So, finally, did the desert itself. Somewhere towards evening, he came to a place where even the

simplest facts—the ground beneath him, the darkening sky above his head—were in doubt. He

wasn't even sure if he was walking. The absence of everything was pleasant, but it didn't last. The

summons must have pulled him on without his even being aware of its call, because the night he'd

left became a sudden day, and he found himself standing—alive, again; Randolph Ernest Jaffe

again—in a desert barer even than the one he'd left. It was early morning here. The sun not yet

high, but beginning to warm the air, the sky perfectly clear.

Now he felt pain, and sickness, but the pull in his gut was irresistible. He had to stagger on though

his whole body was wreckage. Later, he remembered passing through a town, and seeing a steel

tower standing in the middle of the wilderness. But that was only when the journey had ended, at a

simple stone hut, the door of which opened to him as the last vestiges of his strength left him, and

he fell across its threshold.

III

The door was closed when he came round, but his mind wide open. On the other side of a guttering

fire sat an old man with doleful, slightly stupid features, like those of a clown who'd worn and

wiped off fifty years of makeup, his pores enlarged and greasy, his hair, what was left of it, long

and gray. He was sitting cross-legged. Occasionally, while Jaffe worked up the energy to speak, the

old man raised a buttock and loudly passed wind.

"You found your way through," he said, after a time. "I thought you were going to die before you

made it. A lot of people have. It takes real will."

"Through to where?" Jaffe managed to ask.

"We're in a Loop. A loop in time, encompassing a few minutes. I tied it, as a refuge. It's the only

place I'm safe."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Kissoon."

"Are you one of the Shoal?"

The face beyond the fire registered surprise.

"You know a great deal."

"No. Not really. Just bits and pieces."

"Very few people know about the Shoal."

"I know of several," said Jaffe.

"Really?" said Kissoon, his tone toughening. "I'd like their names."

"I had letters from them..." Jaffe said, but faltered when he realized he no longer knew where he'd

left them, those precious clues that had brought him through so much hell and heaven.

"Letters from whom?" Kissoon said.

"People who know...who guess...about the Art."

"Do they? And what do they say about it?"

Jaffe shook his head. "I've not made sense of it yet," he said. "But I think there's a sea—"

"There is," said Kissoon. "And you'd like to know where to find it, and how to be there, and how to

have power from it."

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THEGREATANDSECRETSHOWCliveBarkerPARTONE:THEMESSENGERIHomeropenedthedoor."Comeonin,Randolph."JaffehatedthewayhesaidRandolph,withthefaintesttraceofcontemptintheword,asthoughhekneweverydamncrimeJaffehadevercommitted,rightfromthefirst,thelittlest."Whatareyouwaitingfor?"Homersaid,seeingJaffelinger."You'v...

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Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

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