No sooner thought than done. Her mind sank towards the binding, and slipped between the threads into the body’s maze. She had expected darkness, but there was light here, the forms of the body’s innards delineated by the milk-blue she’d come to know as the colour of this mystery. There was no foulness; no corruption. It was less a charnel house than a cathedral, the source, she now suspected, of the sacredness that permeated this underground. But, like a cathedral, its substance was quite dead. No blood ran in these veins, no heart pumped, no lungs drew breath. She spread her intention through the stilled anatomy, to feel its length and breadth. The dead woman had been large in life, her hips substantial, her breasts heavy. But the binding bit into her ripeness everywhere, perverting the swell and sweep of her. What terrible last moments she must have known, lying blind in this filth, hearing the wall of her mausoleum being built brick by brick. What kind of crime hung on her, Jude wondered, that she’d been condemned to such a death? And who were her executioners, the builders of that wall? Had they sung as they worked, their voices growing dimmer as the brick blotted them out? Or had they been silent, half-ashamed at their cruelty?
There was so much she wished she knew, and none of it answerable. She’d finished her journey as she’d begun it, in fear and confusion. It was time to be gone from the relic, and home. She willed herself to rise out of the dead blue flesh. To her horror, nothing happened. She was bound here, a prisoner within a prisoner. God help her, what had she done? Instructing herself not to panic, she concentrated her mind on the problem, picturing the cell beyond the binding, and the wall she’d passed so effortlessly through, and the lovers, and the passageway that led out to the open sky. But imagining was not enough. She had let her curiosity overtake her, spreading her spirit through the corpse, and now it had claimed that spirit for itself.
A rage began in her, and she let it come. It was as recognizable a part of her as the nose on her face, and she needed all that she was, every particular, to empower her. If she’d had her own body around her it would have been flushing as her heart-beat caught the rhythm of her fury. She even seemed to hear it - the first sound she’d been aware of since leaving the house - the pump at its hectic work. It was not imagined. She felt it in the body around her, a tremor passing through the long-stilled system as her rage ignited it afresh. In the throne-room of its head a sleeping mind woke, and knew it was invaded.
For Jude there was an exquisite moment of shared consciousness, when a mind new to her - yet sweetly familiar - grazed her own. Then she was expelled by its wakefulness. She heard it scream in horror behind her, a sound of mind rather than throat, which went with her as she sped from the cell, out through the wall, past the lovers shaken from their intercourse by falls of dust, out and up, into the rain, and into a night not blue but bitterest black. The din of the woman’s terror accompanied her all the way back to the house, where, to her infinite relief, she found her own body still standing in the candlelit room. She slid into it with ease, and stood in the middle of the room for a minute or two, sobbing, until she began to shudder with cold. She found her dressing-gown, and as she put it on, realized that her wrists and elbows were no longer stained. She went into the bathroom and consulted the mirror. Her face was similarly cleansed.
Still shivering, she returned to the living room to look for the blue stone. There was a substantial hole in the wall where its impact had gouged out the plaster. The stone itself was unharmed, lying on the rug in front of the hearth. She didn’t pick it up. She’d had enough of its delirium for one night. Avoiding its baleful glance as best she could, she threw a cushion over it. Tomorrow she’d plan some way of ridding herself of the thing. Tonight she needed to tell somebody what she’d experienced, before she began to doubt it. Someone a little crazy, who’d not dismiss her account out of hand; someone already half-believing. Gentle, of course.
Towards midnight, the traffic outside Gentle’s studio dwindled to almost nothing. Anybody who was going to a party tonight had arrived. They were deep in drink, debate or seduction, determined as they celebrated to have in the coming year what the going had denied them. Content with his solitude, Gentle sat cross-legged on the floor, a bottle of bourbon between his legs, and canvases propped up against the furniture all around him. Most of them were blank, but that suited his meditation. So was the future.
He’d been sitting in this ring of emptiness for about two hours, drinking from the bottle, and now his bladder needed emptying. He got up and went to the bathroom, using the light from the lounge to go by rather than face his reflection. As he shook the last drops into the bowl, that light went off. He zipped himself up, and went back into the studio. The rain lashed against the window, but there was sufficient illumination from the street for him to see that the door out on to the landing stood inches ajar.
‘Who’s there?’ he said.
The room was still for a moment, then he glimpsed a form against the window, and the smell of something burned and cold pricked his nostrils. The whistler! My God, it had found him!
Fear made him fleet. He broke from his frozen posture, and raced to the door. He would have been through it and away down the stairs had he not almost tripped on the dog waiting obediently on the other side. It wagged its tail in pleasure at the sight of him, and halted his flight. The whistler was no dog-lover. So who was here? Turning back, he reached for the light-switch, and was about to flip it on when the unmistakable voice of Pie’oh’pah said:
‘Please don’t. I prefer the dark.’
Gentle’s finger dropped from the switch, his heart hammering for a different reason.
‘Pie? Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me,’ came the reply. ‘I heard you wanted to see me, from a friend of yours.’ ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I was with the dead. Theresa, and the children.’
‘Oh God. Oh God.’
‘You lost somebody too,’ Pie’oh’pah said.
It was wise, Gentle now understood, to have this exchange in darkness: to talk in shadow, of the grave and the lambs it had claimed.
‘I was with the spirits of my children for a time. Your friend found me in the mourning-place; spoke to me; told me you wanted to see me again. This surprises me, Gentle.’
‘As much as you talking to Taylor surprises me,’ Gentle replied, though after their conversation it shouldn’t have done. ‘Is he happy?’ he asked, knowing the question might be viewed as a banality, but wanting reassurance.
‘No spirit is happy,’ Pie replied. ‘There’s no release for them. Not in this Dominion or any other. They haunt the doors, waiting to leave, but there’s nowhere for them to go.’
‘Why?’
That’s a question that’s been asked for many generations, Gentle. And unanswered. As a child I was taught that before the Unbeheld went into the First Dominion there was a place there into which all spirits were received. My people lived in that Dominion then, and watched over that place, but the Unbeheld drove both the spirits and my people out.’
‘So the spirits have nowhere to go?’
‘Exactly. Their numbers swell, and so does their grief.’
He thought of Taylor, lying on his deathbed, dreaming of release, of the final flight into the Absolute. Instead, if Pie was to be believed, his spirit had entered a place of lost souls, denied both flesh and revelation. What price understanding now, when the end of everything was limbo?
‘Who