The Great And Secret Show (Book of the Art #1)

by Clive Barker

Memory, prophecy and fantasy— the past, the future and the dreaming moment between— are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.

“Where will you fit into the pattern? What are you going to become?” She mused on this. “Do I have to become anything?” she asked eventually. Raul passed the remnants of the cigarette back to her. “Everything is becoming. Sitting here, we’re becoming.”

Tesla, in her frequent railings against the New Hollywood, saved the sourest venom for these, the business-school types who’d superseded the old-style studio bosses, Warner, Selznick, Goldwyn and their clan, to rule the dream factories with their demographics and their calculators.

It’s a movie, Grillo thought. The whole fucking world’s a movie. And the Art was the calling of that bluff. A snatching away of the sheet, the shroud, the screen.

“You know what a shaman is?” “Sure,” said Grillo. “Medicine-man. Witch-doctor.” “More than that,” she said. “He’s a mind-healer. Gets inside the collective psyche and explains it. Stirs it around. I think all the major performers in this—Kissoon, the Jaff, Fletcher—they’re shamans. And Quiddity . . . is America’s dream-space. The world’s maybe. I’ve seen these men fucking it up, Grillo. All on their own trips. Even Fletcher couldn’t get his shit together.” “So maybe what’s needed is a change of shaman,” Grillo said. “Yeah. Why not?” Tesla replied. “I can’t do any worse than they have.” “That’s why you want to keep it to yourself.” “That’s one of the reasons, sure. I can do this, Grillo. I’m weird enough, and most of these shamans, you know, were a little off in some way. Cross-dressers; gender-fuckers. All things to all men. Animal, vegetable and mineral. I want to be that. I’ve always wanted . . . ,” she trailed off. “. . . you know what I’ve always wanted.”

“You have to look,” Tesla said. “Isn’t that what Artists are supposed to do? To look and keep looking, even when the thing you’re looking at is too much to bear. You’re an Artist, Randolph—” “No. I’m not.”

They were at the Lake’s edge now, but of course it wasn’t Michigan they saw as they looked out into the night, it was Quiddity. It hurt, thinking of that place. The same kind of hurt that touched any living soul when a whisper of the dream-sea touched the edge of consciousness. But so much sharper for them, who couldn’t dismiss the longing, but knew Quiddity was real; a place where love might found continents.