"That the three of us-" He stopped, sighing. Then: "That the three of us would find some way to be together." He wasn't looking at her but at the empty ground between them, where he'd clearly wanted his beloved Pie to stand. "The mystif would have learned to love you," he said.

"I don't want to hear this," she snapped.

"It would have been anything you desired. Anything."

"Stop," she told him. "Just stop."

He shrugged. "It's all right," he said. "Pie's dead. And we're going our different ways. It was just some stupid dream I had. I thought you'd want to know it, that's all."

"I don't want anything from you," she replied coldly. "You can keep your lunacies to yourself from now on!"

She'd long since let go of his arm, leaving him to retreat up the steps. But he didn't go. He simply stood watching her, squinting like a drunkard trying to hook one thought to another. It was she who retreated, shaking her head as she turned her back on him and crossed the puddled pavement to the car. Once in, the door slammed, she told the driver to get going, and- the car sped from the curb.

On the step Gentle watched the corner where the car turned long after the vehicle had gone from sight, as though some words of peace might yet come to his lips and be carried from them to call her back. But he was out of persuasions. Though he'd returned to his place as a Reconciler, he knew he'd here opened a wound he lacked the gift to heal, at least until he'd slept and recovered his faculties.

Forty-five minutes after she'd left Gentle on his doorstep, Jude was throwing open the windows of her house to let in the late-afternoon sun and some fresh air. The journey from the studio had pa.s.sed with her scarcely being aware of the fact, so stunned had she been by Gentle's revelation. Married! The thought was absurd, except that she couldn't find it in herself to be amused.

Though it was now many weeks since she'd occupied the house (all but the hardiest of her plants had died from loneliness, and she'd forgotten how the percolator and the locks on the windows worked), it was still a place she felt at home in, and by the time she'd downed a couple of cups of coffee, showered, and changed into some clean clothes, the Dominion from which she'd stepped only hours before was receding. In the presence of so many familiar sights and smells the strangeness of Yzordderrex wasn't its strength but its frailty. Without invitation, her mind had already drawn a line between the place she'd left and the one which she was now in, as solid as the division between a thing dreamt and a thing lived. No wonder Oscar had made a ritual of going up to his treasure room, she thought, and communing with his collection. It was a way of holding on to a perception that was under constant siege by the commonplace.

With several jolts of coffee buzzing around her bloodstream, the fatigue she'd felt on the journey back into the city had disappeared, so she decided to use the evening to visit Oscar's house. She'd called him several times since she'd got back, but the fact that n.o.body had answered was not, she knew, proof of his absence or demise. He'd seldom picked up the telephone in the house-that duty had fallen to Dowd-and more than once he'd stated his abhorrence of the machines. In paradise, he'd once said, the common blessed use telegrams and the saints have talking doves; all the telephones are down below.

She left the house at seven or so, caught a cab, and went to Regent's Park Road. She found the house securely 'locked, without so much as a window standing ajar, which on such a clement evening surely meant there was n.o.body home. Just to be sure, she went around to the rear of the house and peered in. At the sight of her, the three parrots Oscar kept in the back room rose from their perches in alarm. Nor did they settle, but squawked on in panic as she cupped her hands over her brow and peered in to see if their seed and water bowls were full. Though their perches were too far from the window for her to see, their level of agitation was enough to make her fear the worst Oscar, she suspected, hadn't soothed their feathers in a long time. So where was he? Back at the estate, lying dead in the long gra.s.s? If so, it would be folly to go back there now and look for him, with darkness an hour away at most. Besides, when she thought back to her last glimpse of him, she was reasonably certain she'd seen him rising to his feet, framed against the door. He was robust, despite his excesses. She couldn't believe he was dead. In hiding, more like: concealing himself from the Tabula Rasa. With that thought in mind she returned to the front door and scribbled an anonymous note, telling him she was alive and well, and slipped it into the letter box. He'd know who'd penned it. Who else would write that the Express had brought her home, safe and sound?

A little after ten-thirty she was preparing for bed when she heard somebody calling her name from the street. She went to the balcony and looked out to see Clem standing on the pavement below, hollering for all he was worth. It was many months since they'd spoken, and her pleasure at the sight of him was tinged with guilt at her neglect. But from the relief in his voice at her appearance, and the fervor of his hug, she knew he hadn't come to squeeze apologies out of her. He needed to tell her something extraordinary, he said, but before he did (she'd think he was crazy, he warned), he needed a drink. Could she get him a brandy?

She could and did.

He fairly guzzled it, then said, "Where's Gentle?"

The question, and his demanding tone, caught her off guard, and she floundered. Gentle wanted to be invisible, and furious as she was with him, she felt obliged to respect that wish. But Clem needed to know badly.

"He's been away, hasn't he? Klein told me he tried calling, but the phone was cut off. Then he wrote Gentle a letter, and it was never answered-"

"Yes," Jude said. "I believe he's been away."

"But he just came back."

"Did he?" she replied, more puzzled by the moment. "Maybe you know better than I do."

"Not me," he said, pouring himself another brandy. "Taylor."

"Taylor? What are you talking about?"

Clem downed the liquor. "You're going to say I'm crazy, but hear me out, will you?"

"I'm listening."

"I haven't been sentimental about losing him. I haven't sat at home reading his love letters and listening to the songs we danced to. I've tried to get out and be useful for a change. But I have left his room the way it was. I couldn't bring myself to go through his clothes or even strip the bed. I kept putting it off. And the more I didn't do it, the more impossible it seemed to be. Then tonight, I came in just after eight, and I heard somebody talking."

Every particle of Clem's body but his lips was still as he spoke, transfixed by the memory.

"I thought I'd left the radio on, but no, no, I realized it was coming from upstairs, from his bedroom. It was him, Judy, talking clear as day, calling me up the way he used to. I was so afraid I almost fled. Stupid, isn't it? There I was, praying and praying for some sign he was in G.o.d's hands, and as soon as it came I practically shat myself. I tell you, I was half an hour on the stairs, hoping he'd stop calling me. And sometimes he did for a while, and I'd half convince myself I'd imagined it. Then he'd start again. Nothing melodramatic. Just him trying to persuade me not to be afraid and come up and say h.e.l.lo. So, eventually, that's what I did."

His eyes were filling with tears, but there was no grief in his voice.

"He liked that room in the evening. The sun fills it up. That's what it was like tonight: full of sun. And he was there, in the light. I couldn't see him but I knew he was next to me because he said so. He told me I looked well. Then he said, 'It's a glad day, Clem. Gentle came back, and he's got the answers.' "

"What answers?" Jude said.

"That's what I asked him. I said, 'What answers, Tay?' But you know Tay when he's happy. He gets delirious, like a child." Clem spoke with a smile, his gaze on sights remembered from better days. "He was so full of the fact that Gentle was back, I couldn't get much more from him."

Clem looked up at Jude.

"The light was going," he said. "And I think he wanted to go with it. He said that it was our duty to help Gentle. That was why he was showing himself to me this way. It wasn't easy, he said. But then neither was being a guardian angel. And I said, Why only one? One angel when there's two of us? And he said, Because we are one, Clem, you and I. We always were, and we always will be. Those were his exact words, I swear. Then he went away. And you know what I kept thinking?"

"What?"

"That I wished I hadn't waited on the stairs and wasted all that time I could have had with him," Clem set down his gla.s.s, pulled a tissue from his pocket, and blew his nose. "That's all," he said.

"I think that's plenty."

"I know what you're thinking," he said with a little laugh. "You're thinking, Poor Clem. He couldn't grieve so he's having hallucinations."

"No," she said, very softly. "I'm thinking, Gentle doesn't know how lucky he is, having angels like you two."

"Don't humor me."

"I'm not," she said. "I believe everything you've just told me happened."

"You do?"

"Yes."

Again, a laugh. "Why?"

"Because Gentle came home tonight, Clem, and I was the only one who knew it."

He left ten minutes later, apparently content to know that even if he was crazy there was another lunatic in his circle he could turn to when he wanted to share his insanities. Jude told him as much as she felt able at this juncture, which was very little, but she promised to contact Gentle on Clem's behalf and tell him about Taylor's visitation. Clem wasn't so grateful that he was blinded to her discretion.

"You know a lot more than you're telling me, don't you?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "But maybe in a little while I'll be able to tell you more."

"Is Gentle in danger?" Clem asked. "Can you tell me that at least?"

"We all are," she said. "You. Me. Gentle. Taylor."

"Taylor's dead," Clem said. "He's in the light. Nothing can hurt him."

"I hope you're right," she said grimly. "But please, Clem, if he finds you again-"

"He will."

"-then when he does, tell him n.o.body's safe. Just because Gentle's back in the-back home doesn't mean the troubles are over. In fact, they're just beginning."

"Tay says something sublime's going to happen. That's his word: sublime."

"And maybe it will. But there's a lot of room for error. And if anything goes wrong-" She halted, her head filled with memories of the In Ovo and the ruins of Yzordderrex.

"Well, whenever you feel you can tell me," Clem said, "we'll be ready to hear. Both of us." He glanced at his watch. "I should be out of here. I'm late."

"Party?"

"No, I'm working with a hospice for the homeless. We're out most nights, trying to get kids off the streets. The city's full of them." She took him to the door, but before he stepped out he said, "You remember our pagan party at Christmas?"

She grinned. "Of course. That was quite a shindig."

"Tay got stinking drunk after everybody had gone. He knew he wasn't going to be seeing most of them again. Then of course he got sick in the middle of the night, so we stayed up together talking about-oh, I don't know, everything under the sun. And he told me how much he'd always loved Gentle. How Gentle was the mystery man in his life. He'd been dreaming about him, he said: speaking in tongues."

"He told me the same thing," Jude said.

"Then, out of the blue, he said that next year I should have the Nativity back, and go to Midnight Ma.s.s the way we used to, and I told him I thought we'd decided none of that made much sense. And you know what he said to me? He said light was light, whatever name you call it, and it was better to think of it coming in a face you knew." Clem smiled. "I thought he was talking about Christ. But now ... now I'm not so sure."

She hugged him hard, pressing her lips against his flushed cheek. Though she suspected that there was truth in what he said, she couldn't bring herself to voice the possibility. Not knowing that the same face Tay had imagined as that of the returning sun was also the face of the darkness that might soon eclipse them all.

8.

Though the bed Gentle had collapsed into the night before had been stale, and the pillow beneath his head damp, he couldn't have slept more soundly had he been rocked in the arms of Mother Earth Herself. When he woke, fifteen hours later, it was to a fine June morning, and the dreamless time behind him had put new strength into his sinews. There was no gas, electricity, or hot water, so he was obliged to shower and shave in cold water, which was respectively a bracing and a b.l.o.o.d.y experience. That done, he took some time to a.s.sess the state of the studio. It had not remained entirely untouched in his absence. At some juncture either an old girlfriend or a very particular thief had come in-he'd left two of the windows open, so gaining access had presented no difficulty-and the interloper had stolen both clothes and more private bric-a-brac. It was such a long time since he'd been here, however, that he couldn't remember precisely what was missing: some letters and postcards from the mantelpiece, a few photographs (though he'd not liked to be recorded this way, for what were now obvious reasons), and a few items of jewelry (a gold chain; two rings; a crucifix). The theft didn't much bother him. He'd never been a sentimentalist or a h.o.a.rder. Objects were like glossy magazines: fetching for a day, then readily discarded.

There were other, more disgusting, signs of his absence in the bathroom, where clothes he'd left to dry before his departure had grown green fur, and in the refrigerator, the shelves of which were scattered with what looked like pupating zarzi, stinking of putrefaction. Before he could really begin to clean up he had to have some power in the house, and to get it would require some politicking. He'd had the gas, telephone, and electricity cut off in the past, when, in the lean times between forgeries and sugar mamas, he'd run out of funds. But he had the patter to get them turned back on again well honed, and that had to be the priority of the hour.

He dressed in the freshest of his clothes and went downstairs to present himself to the venerable but dotty Mrs. Erskine, who occupied the ground-floor flat. It was she who'd let him in the day before, remarking with her characteristic candor that he looked as though he'd been kicked half to death, to which he'd replied that he felt the same way. She didn't question his absence, which was not surprising given that his occupation of the studio had always been sporadic, but she did ask him if he was going to be staying awhile this time. He said he thought so, and she replied that she was pleased at this, because during these summer days people always got crazy, and since Mr. Erskine's death she was sometimes frightened.

She made tea while he availed himself of her telephone, calling around the services he'd lost. It turned out to be a frustrating business. He'd lost the knack of charming the women he spoke to into some action on his behalf. Instead of an exchange of flatteries he was served a chilly salad of officiousness and condescension. He had unpaid bills, he was told, and his supplies would not be reconnected until payment was forthcoming. He ate some toast Mrs. Erskine had made, drank several cups of tea, then went down into the bas.e.m.e.nt and left a note for the caretaker that he was now back in residence and could he please have his hot water turned on.

That done, he ascended to the studio again and bolted the door behind him. One conversation for the day was enough, he'd decided. He drew the blinds at the windows and lit two candles. They smoked as their dusty wicks first burned, but their light was kinder than the glare of the day, and by it he started to go through the snowdrift of mail that had gathered behind the door. There were bills in abundance, of course, printed in increasingly irate colors, plus the inevitable junk mail. There were very few personal letters, but among them were two that gave him pause. Both were from Vanessa, whose advice that he should slit his lying throat had found such a distressing echo in Athanasius' exhortation at the Erasure. Now she wrote that she missed him, and a day didn't go by without her thinking of him. The second missive was even more direct. She wanted him back in her life. If he wanted to play around with other women she would learn to accommodate that. Would he not at least make contact with her? Life was too short to bear grudges, on either side.

He was buoyed up somewhat by her appeals, and even more so by a letter from Klein, scrawled in red ink on pink, paper. Chester's faintly camp tones rose from the page as Gentle scanned it.

Dear b.a.s.t.a.r.d - Boy, Klein had written. Whose heart are you breaking, and where? Scores of forlorn women are presently weeping on my lap, begging me to forgive you your trespa.s.ses and invite you back into the bosom of the family. Among them, the delectable Vanessa. For G.o.d's sake come home and save me from seducing her. My groin is wet for you, So Vanessa had gone to Klein; desperation indeed. Though she'd met Chester only once that Gentle could recall, she'd subsequently professed to loathing him. Gentle kept all three letters, though he had no intention of acting upon their appeals. There was only one reunion he was eager for, and that was with the house in Clerkenwell. He couldn't face the idea of venturing out in daylight, however. The streets would be too bright and too busy. He'd wait until dark, when he could move across the city as the invisible he aspired to be. He set a match to the rest of the letters and watched them burn. Then he went back to bed and slept through the afternoon in preparation for the business of the night.

He waited until the first stars appeared in a sky of elegiac blue before he raised the blinds. The street outside was quiet, but given that he lacked the cash for a cab he knew he'd have to brush shoulders with a lot of people before he reached Clerkenwell. On a fine evening like this, the Edgware Road would be busy, and there'd be crowds on the Underground. His best hope of reaching his destination unscrutinized was to dress as blandly as possible, and he took some time hunting through his depleted wardrobe for those clothes that would render him most invisible. Once dressed, he walked down to Marble Arch and boarded the Underground. It was only five stations to Chancery Lane, which would put him on the borders of Clerkenwell, but after two he had to get off, gasping and sweating like a claustrophobic. Cursing this new weakness in himself, he sat in the station for half an hour while more trains pa.s.sed through, unable to bring himself to board. What an irony! Here he was, a sometime wanderer in the wilds of the Imajica, incapable of traveling a couple of miles by tube without panicking. He waited until his shaking subsided and a less crowded train came along. Then he reboarded, sitting close to the door with his head in his hands until the journey was over. By the time he emerged at Chancery Lane the sky had darkened, and he stood for several minutes on High Hoiborn, his head thrown back, soaking up the sky. Only when the tremors had left his legs did he head up Gray's Inn Road towards the environs of Gamut Street. Almost all the property on the main thoroughfares had long since been turned to commercial use, but there was a network of streets and squares behind the barricade of darkened office buildings which, protected perhaps by the patronage of notoriety, had been left untouched by the developers. Many of these streets were narrow and mazy, their lamps unlit, their signs missing, as though blind eyes had been turned to them over the generations. But he didn't need signs and lamps; his feet had trodden these ways countless times. Here was Shiverick Square, with its little park all overgrown, and Flaxen Street, and Almoth, and Sterne. And in their midst, coc.o.o.ned by anonymity, his destination.

He saw the corner of Gamut Street twenty yards ahead and slowed his pace to take pleasure in the moment of reunion. There were innumerable memories awaiting him there, the mystif among them. But not all would be so sweet, or so welcome. He would have to ingest them carefully, like a diner with a delicate stomach coming to a lavish table. Moderation was the way. As soon as he felt a surfeit, he'd retreat and return to the studio to digest what he'd learned, let it strengthen him. Only then would he return for a second helping. The process would take time, he knew, and time was of the essence. But so was his sanity. What use would he be as a Reconciler if he choked on the past?

With his heart thumping hard, he came to the corner and, turning it, finally laid his eyes upon the sacred street. Perhaps, during his years of forgetfulness, he'd wandered through these backwaters all unknowing and seen the sight before him now. But he doubted it. More likely, his eyes were seeing Gamut Street for the first time in two centuries. It had changed scarcely at all, preserved from the city planners and their hammer-wielding hordes by the feits whose makers were still rumored here. The trees planted along the pavement were weighed down with unkempt foliage, but their sap's tang was sharp, the air protected from the fumes of Holborn and Gray's Inn Road by the warren of thoroughfares between. Was it just his fancy, or was the tree outside number 28 particularly lush, fed perhaps by a seepage of magics from the step of the Maestro's house?

He began towards them, tree and step, the memories already returning in force. He heard the children singing behind him, the song that had so tormented him when the Autarch had told him who he was. Sartori, he'd said, and this charmless ditty, sung by piping voices, had come in pursuit of the name. He'd loathed it then. Its melody was ba.n.a.l; its words were nonsense. But now he remembered how he'd first heard it, walking along this very pavement with the children in procession on the opposite sh.o.r.e, and how flattered he'd been that he was famous enough to have reached the lips of children who would never read or write or, most probably, reach the age of p.u.b.erty. .All of London knew who he was, and he liked his fame. He was talked about at court, Roxborough said, and should soon expect an invitation. People who'd not so much as touched his sleeve were claiming intimate a.s.sociation.

But there were still those, thank G.o.d, who kept an exquisite distance, and one such soul had lived, he remembered, in the house opposite: a nymph called Allegra who liked to sit at her dressing table near the window with her bodice half unlaced, knowing she had an admirer in the Maestro across the street. She'd had a little curly-haired dog, and sometimes in the evening he'd hear her piping voice summon the lucky hound onto her lap, where she'd let it snuggle. One afternoon, a few paces from where he stood now, he'd met the girl out walking with her mother and had made much of the dog, suffering its little tongue on his mouth for the smell of her s.e.x in its fur. What had become of that child? Had she died a virgin or grown old and fat, wondering about the man who'd been her most ardent admirer?

He glanced up at the window where Allegra had sat. No light burned in it now. The house, like almost all these buildings, was dark. Sighing, he turned his gaze towards number 28 and, crossing the street, went to the door. It was locked, of course, but one of the lower windows had been broken at some point and never repaired. He reached through the smashed pane and unlocked it, then slid the window up and himself inside. Slowly, he reminded himself; go slowly. Keep the flow under control.

It was dark, but he'd come prepared for that eventuality, with candle and matches. The flame guttered at first, and the room rocked at its indecision, but by degrees it strengthened, and he felt a sensation he'd not expected swelling like the light: pride. In its time, this, his house, had been a place of great souls and great ambition, where all commonplace debate had been banned. If you wanted to talk politics or t.i.ttle-tattle you went to the coffee house; if you wanted commerce, to the Exchange. Here, only miracles. Here, only the rising of the spirit. And, yes, love, if it was pertinent (which it was, so often); and sometimes bloodletting. But never the prosaic, never the trivial. Here the man who brought the strangest tale was the most welcome. Here every excess was celebrated if it brought visions, and every vision a.n.a.lyzed for the hints it held to the nature of the Everlasting.

He lifted the candle and, holding it high, began to walk through the house. The rooms-there were many-were badly dilapidated, the boards creaking under his feet, weakened by rot and worm, the walls mapping continents of damp. But the present didn't insist upon him for long. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, memory was lighting candles everywhere, their luminescence spilling through the dining room door and from the rooms above. It was a generous light, clothing naked walls, putting lush carpets underfoot, and setting fine furniture on their pile. Though the debaters here might have aspired to pure spirit, they were not averse to comforting the flesh while still cursed with it. Who would have guessed, seeing the modest facade of the house from the street, that the interior would be so finely furnished and ornamented? And seeing these glories appear, he heard the voices of those who'd wallowed in that luxury. Laughter first; then vociferous argument from somebody at the top of the stairs. He couldn't see the debaters yet-perhaps his mind, which he'd instructed in caution, was holding the flood back-but he could put names to both of them, sight unseen. One was Horace Tyrwhitt, the other Isaac Abelove. And the laughter? That was Joshua G.o.dolphin, of course. He had a laugh like the Devil's laugh, full and throaty.

"Come on, then," Gentle said aloud to the memories. "I'm ready to see your faces."

And as he spoke, they came: Tyrwhitt on the stairs, overdressed and overpowdered, as ever, keeping his distance from Abelove in case the magpie his pursuer was nursing flew free.

"It's bad luck," Tyrwhitt was protesting. "Birds in the house are bad luck!"

"Luck's for fishermen and gamblers," Abelove replied.

"One of these days you'll turn a phrase worth remembering," Tyrwhitt replied. "Just get the thing out before I wring its neck." He turned towards Gentle. "Tell him, Sartori."

Gentle was shocked to see the memory's eyes fix so acutely upon him. "It does no harm," he found himself replying. "It's one of G.o.d's creatures."

At which point the bird rose flapping from Abelove's grasp, emptying its bowels as it did so on the man's wig and face, which brought a hoot of laughter from Tyrwhitt.

"Now don't wipe it off," he told Abelove as the magpie fluttered away. "It's good luck."

The sound of his laughter brought Joshua G.o.dolphin, imperious as ever, out of the dining room. "What's the row?"

Abelove was already clattering after the bird, his calls merely alarming it more. It fluttered around the hallway in panic, cawing as it went.

"Open the d.a.m.ned door!" G.o.dolphin said. "Let the b.l.o.o.d.y thing out!"

"And spoil the sport?" Tyrwhitt said.

"If everyone would but calm their voices," Abelove said, "it would settle."

"Why did you bring it in?" Joshua wanted to know.

"It was sitting on the step," Abelove replied. "I thought it was injured."

"It looks quite well to me," G.o.dolphin said, and turned his face, ruddied with brandy, towards Gentle. "Maestro," he said, inclining his head a little. "I'm afraid we began dinner without you. Come in. Leave these bird brains to play."