“Once matter and spirit are in the same language, one can influence the other in any number of ways. Flesh and bone can be transformed, transcended—” “Or transported?” “Exactly.”
Jude remembered how the removal of a traveler from this world into another looked from the outside: the flesh folding upon itself, the body distorted out of all recognition.
“Does it hurt?” she said. “At the beginning, but not badly.” “When will it begin?” she said. He stood up. “It already has,” he said. She felt it, as he spoke: a pressure in her bowels and bladder, a tightness in her chest that made her catch her breath.
“Breathe slowly,” he said, putting his palm against her breastbone. “Don’t fight it. Just let it happen. There’s no harm going to come to you.”
She looked down at his hand, then beyond it to the circle that enclosed them, and out through the door of the Retreat to the sunlit grass that lay just a few paces from where she stood. Close as it was, she couldn’t return there. The train she’d boarded was gathering speed around her. It was too late for doubts or second thoughts. She was trapped.
“It’s all right,” she heard Oscar say, but it didn’t feel that way at all.
There was a pain in her belly so sharp it felt as though she’d been poisoned, and an ache in her head, and an itch too deep in her skin to be scratched. She looked at Oscar. Was he enduring the same discomforts? If so he was bearing them with remarkable fortitude, smiling at her like an anesthetist.
“It’ll be over soon,” he was saying. “Just hold on . . . it’ll he over soon.”
He drew her closer to him, and as he did so she felt a tingling pass through her cells, as though a rainstorm was breaking inside her, sluicing the pain away.
“Better?” he said, the word more shape than sound.
“Yes,” she told him and, smiling, put her lips to his, closing her eyes with pleasure as their tongues touched.
The darkness behind her lids was suddenly brightened by gleaming lines, falling like meteors across her mind’s eye. She lifted her lids again, but the spectacle came out of her skull, daubing Oscar’s face with streaks of brightness. A dozen vivid hues picked out the furrows and creases of his skin; another dozen, the geology of bone beneath; and another, the lineaments of nerves and veins and vessels, to the tiniest detail. Then, as though the mind interpreting them had done with its literal translation and could now rise to poetry, the layered maps of his flesh simplified. Redundancies and repetitions were discarded, the forms that emerged so simple and so absolute that the matter they represented seemed wan by comparison, and receded before them. Seeing this show, she remembered the glyph she’d imagined when she and Oscar had first made love: the spiral and curve of her pleasure laid on the velvet behind her eyes. Here was the same process again, only the mind imagining them was the circle’s mind, empowered by the stones and by the travelers’ demand for passage.
A motion at the door distracted her gaze momentarily. The air around them was close to dropping its sham of sights altogether, and the scene beyond the circle was blurred. But there was enough color in the suit of the man at the threshold for her to know him even though she couldn’t make out his face. Who else but Dowd wore that absurd shade of apricot? She said his name, and though she heard no sound from her throat, Oscar understood her alarm and turned towards the door.
Dowd was approaching the circle at speed, his intention perfectly clear: to hitch a ride to the Second Dominion. She’d seen the gruesome consequences of such interference before, on this very spot, and she braced herself against Oscar for the coming shock. Instead of trusting to the circle to dispatch the hanger-on, however, Oscar turned from her and went to strike Dowd. The circle’s flux multiplied his violence tenfold, and the glyph of his body became an illegible scrawl, the colors dirtied in an instant. The pain she’d thought washed away swept back over her. Blood ran from her nose and into her open mouth. Her skin itched so violently she’d have brought blood to that too had the pain in her joints not kept her from moving.