The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker

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of the desk. On the wall were signed photographs of the stars whom he’d advised and treated. So many great names. Most of them dead; too many of them prematurely. Fame had its price.

      ‘I’m glad you’re coming to your senses. If you’re really serious about this …’

      ‘I’m here aren’t I? How much more fucking serious do I have to get? You know how I hate talking about this shit. I never did a death gag in my life, Lou. You know that? Not once. Anything else. Anything. But not that!’

      ‘It’s got to be faced sooner or later.’

      ‘I’ll take later.’

      ‘OK, so I’ll have a health plan drawn up for you. Diet; exercise; the works. But I’m telling you now, Buddy, it won’t make pleasant reading!’

      ‘I heard somewhere: laughter makes you live longer.’

      ‘Show me where it says comedians live forever, I’ll show you a tomb with a quip on it.’

      ‘Yeah. So when do I begin?’

      ‘Start today. Throw out the malts and the nose-candy, and try using that pool of yours once in a while.’

      ‘It needs cleaning.’

      ‘So get it cleaned.’

      That was the easy part. Buddy had Ellen call the Pool Service as soon as he got home and they sent somebody up the following day. The health plan, as Tharp had warned, was a tougher call, but whenever his will faltered he thought of the way he looked in the mirror some mornings, and the fact that his dick was only visible if he held his gut in so hard it ached. When vanity failed he thought of death, but only as a last resort.

      He’d always been an early riser, so getting up for a morning run wasn’t a great chore. The sidewalks were empty, and often – as today – he’d make his way down the Hill and through the East Grove to the woods, where the ground didn’t bruise the soles the same way the concrete did, and his panting was set to birdsong. On such days the run was strictly a one-way journey; he’d have Jose Luis bring the limo down the Hill and meet him when he emerged from the woods, the car stocked with towels and iced tea. Then they’d head back up to Coney Eye, as he’d dubbed the estate, the easy way: on wheels. Health was one thing; masochism, at least in public, quite another.

      The run had other benefits besides firming up his belly. He had an hour or so alone to get to grips with anything that was troubling him. Today, inevitably, his thoughts were of Rochelle. The divorce settlement would be finalized this week, and his sixth marriage would be history. It would be the second shortest of the six. His forty-two days with Shashi had been the fastest, ending with a shot that had come so close to blowing off his balls his sweat ran cold whenever he thought of it. Not that he’d spent more than a month with Rochelle in the year they’d been married. After the honeymoon, and its little surprises, she’d taken herself back to Fort Worth to calculate her alimony. It had been a mismatch from the beginning. He should have realized that, the first time she failed to laugh at his routine, which was, coincidentally, the first time she heard his routine. But of all his wives, including Elizabeth, she was the most physically alluring. Stone-faced she’d been, but the sculptor had genius.

      He was thinking of her face as he came off the sidewalk and hit the woods. Maybe he should call her; ask her to come back to Coney for one final try. He’d done it before, with Diane, and they’d had the best two months of their years together, before the old resentments had set in afresh. But that had been Diane, this was Rochelle. It was useless attempting to project behaviour patterns from one woman to the next. They were all so gloriously different. Men were a dull bunch by comparison: dowdy and mono-minded. Next time round he wanted to be born a lesbian.

      Off in the distance, he heard laughter; the unmistakable giggling of young girls. A strange sound to hear so early in the morning. He stopped running and listened for it again, but the air was suddenly empty of all other sounds, even birdsong. The only noises he could hear were internal: the labourings of his system. Had he imagined the laughter? It was perfectly possible, his thoughts being as full of women as they were. But as he prepared to about-turn and leave the thicket to its songlessness, the giggling came again, and with it an odd, almost hallucinatory, change in the scene around him. The sound seemed to animate the entire wood. It brought movement to the leaves, it brightened the sunlight. More than that: it changed the very direction of the sun. In the silence, the light had been pallid, its source still low in the east. On the cue of laughter it became noon-day bright, pouring down on the upturned faces of the leaves.

      Buddy neither believed nor disbelieved his eyes: he simply stood before the experience as before feminine beauty, mesmerized. Only when the third round of laughter began did he grasp its direction, and start off at a run towards it, the light still vacillating.

      A few yards on he saw a movement ahead of him through the trees. Bare skin. A girl stripping off her underwear. Beyond her was another girl, this one blonde, and strikingly attractive, beginning to do the same. He knew instinctively they weren’t quite real, but he still advanced cautiously, for fear of startling them. Could illusions be startled? He didn’t want to risk it; not with such pretty sights to see. The blonde girl was the last one undressed. There were three others, he counted, already wading out into a lake that flickered on the rim of solidity. Its ripples threw light up on to the blonde’s face – Arleen, they named her, as they shouted back to the shore. Advancing from tree to tree, he got to within ten feet of the lake’s edge. Arleen was in up to her thighs now. Though she bent to cup water in her hands and splash it on her body it was virtually invisible. The girls who were in deeper than she, and swimming, seemed to be floating in mid-air.

      Ghosts, he half-thought; these are ghosts. I’m spying on the past, being re-run in front of me. The thought propelled him from hiding. If his assumption was correct then they might vanish at any moment and he wanted to drink their glory down in gulps before they did.

      There was no trace of the clothes they’d shed in the grass where he stood, nor any sign – when one or other of them glanced back towards the shore – that they saw him there.

      ‘Don’t go too far,’ one of the quartet yelled to her companion. The advice was ignored. The girl was moving further from the shore, her legs spreading and closing, spreading and closing as she swam. Not since the first wet dreams of his adolescence could he remember an experience as erotic as this, watching these creatures suspended in the gleaming air, their lower bodies subtly blurred by the element that bore them up, but not so much he could not enjoy their every detail.

      ‘Warm!’ yelled the adventurer, who was treading water a good distance from him, ‘it’s warm out here.’

      ‘Are you kidding?’

      ‘Come and feel!’

      Her words inspired further ambition in Buddy. He’d seen so much. Dared he now touch? If they couldn’t see him – and they plainly couldn’t – where was the harm in getting so close he could run his fingertips along their spines?

      The water made no sound as he stepped into the lake; nor did he feel so much as a touch against his ankles and shins as he waded deeper. It buoyed Arleen up well enough however. She was floating on the lake’s surface, her hair spread around her head, her gentle strokes taking her further from him. He hurried in pursuit, the water no brake upon him, halving the distance between himself and the girl in seconds. His arms were extended, his eyes fixed upon the pinkness of her labia as she kicked away from him.

      The adventurer had begun to shout something, but he ignored her agitation. To touch Arleen was all he could think about. To put his hand upon her and she not protest, but go on swimming, while he had his way. In his haste his foot snagged on something. Arms still reaching for the girl he fell, face down. The jolt brought him to his senses enough to interpret the shouts from the deeper water. They were no longer cries of pleasure, but of alarm. He raised his head from the ground. The two furthest swimmers were struggling in mid-air, turning their faces up to the sky.

      ‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

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