Free Galilee by Clive Barker Page B

barely speak.
    â€œI want . . .”
    â€œI know,” she said softly. “I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back.”
    â€œYes . . .” I said. I was close to sobbing.
    â€œBut here it is,” she said. “All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it’s yours.”
    â€œNo,” I protested. “I’ve never been in this place before.”
    â€œBut it’s been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were born.”
    â€œDreamed it into me . . .” I said.
    â€œEvery sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come . . . it’s in your blood and in your bowels.”
    â€œThen why am I so afraid of it?”
    â€œBecause you’ve held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you’re the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you . . .”
    Did I dare believe any of this?
    Cesaria replied as though she’d heard the doubt spoken aloud.
    â€œI can’t reassure you,” she said. “Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you’ve ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again.”
    â€œFall where?”
    â€œWhy back into your own hands, of course,” she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn’t blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I’d never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that: I was afraid.
    â€œAsk your question,” Cesaria said. “You have a question. Ask it.”
    â€œIt sounds so childish.”
    â€œThen have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it.”
    â€œAm I . . . safe?”
    â€œSafe?”
    â€œYes. Safe.”
    â€œIn your flesh? No. I can’t guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there’s other hands to hold you. I’ve told you that already.”
    â€œAnd . . . I think I believe you,” I said.
    â€œSo then,” Cesaria said, “you have no reason not to let the memories come.”
    She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.
    â€œTouch me,” she said.
    I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.
    â€œDon’t be afraid,” she said to me. “They don’t bite.”
    I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn’t bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn’t realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can’t imagine how that’s possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.
    I don’t believe I had ever stood so close to my father’s wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush