"Where would I meet Goddesses, Dowd?" Jude replied. "I've lived in the Fifth, in London, in Notting Hill Gate. There are no Goddesses."
Even as she spoke she thought of Celestine, buried beneath the Tabula Rasa's tower. Was she a sister to the deities that haunted Yzordderrex? A transforming force, locked away by a sex that worshiped fixedness? At the memory of the prisoner, and her cell, Jude's mind grew suddenly light, as though she'd downed a whisky on an empty stomach. She had been touched by the miraculous, after all. So if once, why not many times? If now, why not in her forgotten past?
"I've got no way back," she said, protesting the difficulty of this as much for her own benefit as Dowd's.
"It's easy," he replied. "Just think of what it was like to be born."
"I don't even remember my childhood."
"You had no childhood, lovey. You had no adolescence. You were born just the way you are, overnight. Quaisoir was the first Judith, and you, my sweet, are only her replica. Perfect, maybe, but stilt a replica."
"I won't... I don't... believe you."
"Of course you must refuse the truth at first. It's perfectly understandable. But your body knows what's true and what isn't. You're shaking, inside and out...."
"I'm tired," she said, knowing the explanation was pitifully weak.
"You're feeling more than weary," Dowd said. "Admit it."
As he pried, she remembered the results of his last revelations about her past: how she'd dropped to the kitchen floor, hamstrung by invisible knives. She dared not succumb to such a collapse now, with the well a foot from where she stood, and Dowd knew it.
"You have to face the memories," he was saying. "Just spit them out. Go on. You'll feel better for it, I promise you."
She could feel both her limbs and her resolve weakening as he spoke, but the prospect of facing whatever lay in the darkness at the back of her skull—and however much she distrusted Dowd, she didn't doubt there was something horrendous there—was almost as terrifying as the thought of the well taking her. Perhaps it would be better to die here and now, two sisters extinguished within the same hour, and never know whether Dowd's claims were true or not. But then suppose he'd been lying to her all along—the actor chappie's finest performance yet—and she was not a shadow, not a replica, not a thing bred to do service, but a natural child with natural parents: a creature unto herself, real, complete? Then she'd be giving herself to death out of fear of self-discovery, and Dowd would have claimed another victim. The only way to defeat him was to call his bluff; to do as he kept urging her to do and go into the darkness at the back of her head, ready to embrace whatever revelations it concealed. Whichever Judith she was, she was; whether real or replica, natural or bred. There was no escape from herself in the living world. Better to know the truth, once and for all.
The decision ignited a flame in her skull, and the first phantoms of the past appeared in her mind's eye.
"Oh, my Goddess," she murmured, throwing back her head. "What is this? What is this?"
She saw herself lying on bare boards in an empty room, a fire burning in the grate, warming her in her sleep and flattering her nakedness with its tuster. Somebody had marked her body while she slept, daubing upon it a design she recognized—the glyph she'd first seen in her mind's eye when she'd made love with Oscar, then glimpsed again as she passed between Dominions—the spiraling sign of her flesh, here painted on flesh itself in half a dozen colors.
She moved in her sleep, and the whorls seemed to leave traces of themselves in the air where she'd been, their persistence exciting another motion, this other in the ring of sand that bounded her hard bed. It rose around her like the curtain of the Borealis, shimmering with the same colors in which her glyph had been painted, as though something of her essential anatomy was in the very air of the room. She was entranced by the beauty of the sight.
"What are you seeing?" she heard Dowd asking her.
"Me," she said, "lying on the floor ... in a circle of sand...."
"Are you sure it's you?" he said.
She was about to pour scorn on his question, when she realized its import. Perhaps this wasn't her, but her sister.
"Is there any way of knowing?" she said.
"You'll soon see," he told her.
So she did. The curtain of sand began to wave more violently, as if seized by a wind unleashed within the circle. Particles flew from it, intensifying as they were thrown against the dark air: motes of the purest color rising like new stars, then dropping again, burning in their descent, towards the place where she, the witness, lay. She was lying on the ground close to her sister, receiving the rain of color like a grateful earth, needing its sustenance if she was to grow and swell and become fruitful.
"What am I?" she said, following the fall of color to snatch a glimpse of the ground it was falling upon.
The beauty of what she'd seen so far had lulled her into vulnerability. When she saw her own unfinished body, the shock threw her out of the remembrance like a blow. Sud-, denly she was teetering on the wall's edge again, with Dowd's hand the only check upon her falling. Icewater sweat filled her pores.
"Don't let me go," she said.
"What are you seeing?" he asked her.
"Is this being born?" she sobbed. "Oh, Christ, is this being born?"
"Go back to the memory," he said. "You've begun it, so, finish it!" He shook her. "Hear me? Finish it!"
She saw his face raging before her. She saw the well, yearning behind. And in between, in the firelit room awaiting her in her head, she saw a nightmare worse than both: her anatomy, barely made, lying in a circle of perverted enchantments, raw until the distillates of another woman's body put skin on her sinew and color in that skin, put the tint in her eyes and the gloss on her lips, gave her the same breasts, belly, and sex. This was not birth, it was duplication. She was a facsimile, a likeness stolen from a slumbering original.
"I can't bear it," she said.
"I did warn you, lovey," Dowd replied. "It's never easy, reliving the first moments."
"I'm not even real," she said.
"Let's stay clear of the metaphysics," came the reply. "What you are, you are. You had to know sooner or later."
"I can't bear it. I can't bear it."
"But you are bearing it," Dowd said. "You just have to take it slowly. Step by step."
"No more...."
"Yes," he insisted. "A lot more. That was the worst. It'll get easier from now on."
That was a lie. When memory took her again, almost without her inviting it, she was raising her arms above her head, letting the colors congeal around her outstretched fingers. Pretty enough, until she let one arm drop beside her and her new-made nerves felt a presence at her side, sharing the womb. She turned her head and screamed. "What is it?" Dowd said. "Did the Goddess come?" It was no Goddess. It was another unfinished thing, gaping at her with lidless eyes, putting out its colorless tongue, which was still so rough it could have licked her new skin off her. She retreated from it, and her fear aroused it, the pale anatomy shaken by silent laughter. It too had gathered motes of stolen color, she saw, but it had not bathed in them; rather, it had caught them in its hands, postponing the moment it attired itself until it had luxuriated in its flayed nakedness.
Dowd was interrogating her again. "Is it the Goddess?" he was asking. "What are you seeing? Speak it out, woman! Speak it—"
His demand was cut suddenly short. There was a beat of silence, then a cry of alarm so shrill her conjuring of the circle and the thing she'd shared it with vanished. She felt Dowd's grip on her wrist slip, and her body toppled. She flailed as she fell, and more by luck than design her motion threw her sideways, along the rim of the well, rather than pitching her within. Instantly, she began to slip down the incline. She clutched at the pavement. But the stone had been polished by years of passage, and her body slid towards the edge as if the depths were calling in a long-neglected debt. Her legs kicked empty air, her hips sliding over the well's lip while her fingers sought some purchase, however slight—a name etched a little deeper than the rest; a rose thorn, wedged between stones—that would give her some defense against gravity. As she did so she heard Dowd cry out a second time, and she looked up to see a miracle.