by Clive Barker
There’s only one portion of the conversation that I have returned to muse over: and that’s the part about being a village storyteller. I realize she meant it as a form of condemnation, but in truth I can see nothing undesirable about being thus employed. Indeed I have imagined myself many, many times sitting beneath an ancient tree in some dusty square—in Samarkand, perhaps; yes! in Samarkand—telling my epic in pieces, for the price of bread and opium. I would have had a fine time doing that: get myself fat and flying by parceling my tale out, day after day. I would have had my audience wrapped around my little finger; coming back every afternoon to visit me in the blue shadows, and asking me to sell them another piece of the family saga.
My father was a great improviser of stories. In fact, it’s one of the few truly fond memories I have of him. My sitting at his feet when I was a child, while he wove wonderful fictions for me. There were often malevolent stories, by the way: violent, bloodthirsty tales about the way the world was in some uncalendered time. When he was young, perhaps; if indeed he ever was.
A lot later, when I was approaching adulthood and about ready to go out looking for female company, he told me that I shouldn’t underestimate the potency of stories in the art of seduction. He had not seduced my mother with kisses or compliments, he said (and he certainly hadn’t gotten her drunk and raped her, as Cesaria had told me); he’d brought her to his lap, and thence to his bed, with a story.
Which brings us back (though you do not yet see why, you will) to that night on Kaua’i, and to Rachel.
PART FIVE
The Act of Love
I
The wind had carried the rain clouds off toward Mount Waialeale by early evening, where they’d shed the bulk of their freight. The skies cleared over the North Shore, and about seven-fifteen the gusts died to nothing with uncanny suddenness. Rachel was eating at the time—a plate of baked chicken, prepared by Heidi, who’d come in, cooked, and departed. She looked up from her meal to see that the palms were no longer churning, and the sea was quite placid.
The silence unnerved her a little, so she put on some music: a big-band melody. It was a mistake; it reminded her of a night early in her courtship with Mitchell when they’d gone out dancing, and he’d chosen a very exclusive place uptown where a small band played forties tunes, and everyone danced cheek to cheek. Oh but she’d been in love that night; like a fifteen-year-old infatuated with the school quarterback. He’d plied her with champagne, and told her that he was devoted to her, and always would be.
“Liar . . .” she murmured as she stared out at the sea. Sometimes, when she remembered things he’d said—sweet things that he’d betrayed, hard things that he’d known he would hurt her by saying—she wanted him right there in front of her, to point an accusing finger and say: why did you say that? God Mitchell, you were such a liar, such a miserable liar . . .
Rather than turn the music off, however, she sat it out, determined to endure every last, melancholy note. The only way to get past the hurt was to face it. If this trip to Eden did nothing else, she thought, it would at least give her an opportunity to leaf through her memories, and look at them clearly. Then, and only then, could she move on. Put Mitchell and all he’d been to her in the past, where he belonged, and start a new life.
A new life. There was a daunting thought. It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered what would become of her now, but the question had a new pertinence on this island, where she knew others had come before her, and begun again. Jimmy Hornbeck, for one. And what of the Montgomerys and the Robertsons and Schmutzes buried on the cliff? They too had been emigrants, presumably. Fugitives perhaps, like her: running from lives that had hurt and disappointed them. It wouldn’t be so bad at that, she thought, to disappear from the world and live and die in this paradise; to be buried on a cliff where nobody came, nobody mourned, nobody remembered.
She went to bed at ten, or thereabouts, and fell asleep as quickly as she had the night before. But this time she didn’t sleep through till daybreak. Instead she stirred from a dream some while after midnight. She had the impression that she’d been woken by something, but she wasn’t sure what it was. All she could hear was the rhythmic rasp of crickets, and the soft croaking of frogs. There was a little moonlight coming between the drapes, but there was nothing disturbing enough to have roused her.
Then she realized: it was a smell that had woken her. The sharp-sweet scent of something burning. Her mind reluctantly formed the thought that she’d better get up and check that the source of the smell wasn’t somewhere in the house. Her body still heavy with sleep she pulled back the sheet and climbed out of bed. Then she slipped into a T-shirt and knickers and went downstairs to investigate. As soon as she reached the living room she spotted the fire: it was burning brightly at the top of the beach. Had the three surfers she’d seen the first day come back in the middle of the night to make a bonfire, and maybe smoke a little pot? If so, they’d built a much bigger fire than last time. It was a steep pyramid of timbers, from the flanks and apex of which bright yellow flames sprang. The smell however, wasn’t just that of burning wood. There was an aromatic pungency about it, which lent it a pleasing exoticism.
She slid open the French doors and stepped outside, thinking she would see the fire-tenders better. But she could see nobody. There were stars, a great array of them bright overhead, but no moon. She went back into the house, located a pack of cigarettes she’d bought in Honolulu Airport, lit one, and wandered back out again, this time stepping off the veranda onto the chilly grass, and on down the lawn to the path.
Though she was now no more than ten or twelve yards from the fire, she could still see no sign of its architects. But she could smell the fragrance more strongly than ever, rising out of the pyramid like incense from a mountainous censer. The smell pleased her even more than it had at first. It was sweet yet sharp, like the honey from ancient hives.
She wandered through the shrubs and over the sand toward the fire, enjoying its warmth on her face and bare legs. Obviously the fire-makers had departed, leaving their handiwork to blaze away through the night. Not the cleverest thing to do, she thought. If the wind were to rise again it could easily blow splinters of fiery wood into the bushes, and, worse still, toward the house.
What should she do, she wondered? Wait here until the fire burned itself out or attempt to smother the flames with sand? The second option was beyond her, she decided. The fire was simply too big, and too well made. And as to waiting here; well, it would be a long, long wait.
Perhaps for once she was just going to have to have a little faith that the worst would not happen.
She should just go back to bed and sleep. By morning the fire would be a blackened, smoky pit in the sand, and her fears of cataclysm would seem ridiculous. Still, she might tell the surfers next time she saw them not to build their fires so big, or so close to the tree line. So thinking, she walked once around the fire, and started back to the house.
The scent came with her. It was in her clothes, in her hair, on her skin, in her mouth even. And it seemed—though this was plainly nonsensical—that the further she got from its source the more powerful it became, as though cooler air was refining it. By the time she got into the house it was so strong it might have been oozing out of her pores.
She was of half a mind to shower before she climbed back into bed, but she decided against it, persuaded less by fatigue as by the subtle sense of intoxication the fragrance had induced. Her head felt feathery, her perceptions a little awry (when she reached to turn off the bedside lamp she missed it by a couple of inches, which amused her). When she’d finally found the switch, and lay her head down in darkness, there were colors billowing behind her lids, intense as the hues crawling on a soap bubble. She watched them entranced, vaguely wondering if they’d been burned onto her retina from staring at the fire. The thought came into her head that they were with her for ever now—the colors, the aroma—and that she was therefore their captive: bounded by them,
shaped by them. She would never see the world without it being colored for her; never draw breath but that she’d smell the fragrance of the fire.
She opened her eyes again, just to be certain the world she’d left out there, beyond her lids, was still in existence. There was a nice, mellow sense of dislocation in all this: no paranoia, no fear; simply suspicion that things outside her head were not to be taken too seriously tonight.
The room was still there: the ring of lamplight on the ceiling, the open window, the drapes lifted and let go by the breeze; the carved bed in which she lay, with its lovers lying in their ripe bowers; the door at the end of the bed, leading out onto the hallway, down the stairs—
Her gaze seemed to go with her thoughts, out onto the darkened landing—floating up to the ceiling one moment, grazing the footworn weave of the rug the next.
By the time she got to the top of the stairs an unbidden thought had formed in her head: she wasn’t alone in the house. Somebody had come in. As silent as smoke, and just as harmless—surely, on a night like this nobody meant harm—somebody had entered the house and was there at the bottom of the stairs.
The realization didn’t trouble her in the slightest. She felt absurdly inviolate, as though she had not simply watched the fire on the beach but stood in its midst and walked through it unscorched.
She looked down the flight in the hope of seeing him, and thought she caught the vaguest impression of his form, there in the darkness: a big, broad man; a black man, she thought. He started to climb the stairs. She could feel the air at the top of the flight become agitated at his approach, excited at the prospect of being drawn into his lungs. Her gaze retreated along the landing, back toward the bedroom; back into her head. She would pretend she was asleep, perhaps. Let him come to her bedside and touch her awake. Put his hand to her lips, to her breast; or if he wanted to, press his fingers against her belly; then down, between her legs. She’d let him do that. None of this was quite real anyway, so why the hell not? He could do whatever he wanted, and no harm would come to her. Not here, in her carved bower-bed. Only joy here; only bliss.
For all these fearless thoughts there was still a corner of her intellect that was counseling caution.
“You’re not being rational,” this fretful self said to her. “The smoke’s got into your head. The smoke and this island. They’ve got you all turned about.”
Probably true, the dreamy wildling in her said. So what?
“But you don’t know who he is, “ the cautious one pointed out. “And he’s black There aren’t any blacks in Dansky, Ohio. Or if there are, you don’t know any. They’re different.”
So am I, the wildling replied. I’m not who I was, and I’m all the better for it. So what if the island’s working magic on me? I need a little magic. I’m ready. Oh Lord, I’m more than ready.
She’d closed her eyes, still thinking she would pretend to be sleeping when he came in. But as soon as she felt the stirring of the air against her face, announcing his presence at the threshold, she opened them again, and asked him, very quietly, who he was.
By way of reply, he spoke one word only.
“Galilee,” he said.
II
At that moment, on the cloud-obscured summit of Mount Waialeale, the rain was falling at the rate of an inch and a half an hour. In gorges too inaccessible for exploration, plants that had never been named were drinking down the deluge; insects that would never venture where a human heel could crush them were sheltering their brittle heads. These were secret places, secret species; rare phenomena on a planet where little was deemed sacred enough, exquisite enough, tremulous enough, to be preserved from the prod, the scalpel, the exhibition.
Out in the benighted sea, whales were passing between the islands, mothers and their children flank to flank, playful adolescents breaching in the dark, rising up in frenzied coats of foam and twisting so as to spy the stars before they came crashing down again. In the coral reef below them, its caves and gullies as untainted as Waialeale’s heights, other secret lives proceeded: the warm currents carrying myriad tiny forms, transparent flecks of purpose which for all their insignificant size nourished the great whales above.
And in between the summit and the reef? There was mystery there too. No less an order of life than the flower or the plankton, though it belonged to no class or hierarchy. It lived, this life, in the human head, the human heart. It moved only when touched, which was rarely, but when it did—when it shifted itself, showed itself to the creature in which it lived—there was revelation. The prospect of love could stir it, the prospect of death could stir it; even, on occasion a simpler thing: a song, a fine thought. Most of all it was moved by the prospect of its own apotheosis. If it felt its moment was near, then it would rise into the face of its host like a light, and blaze and blaze—
“Whoever you are . . . ” Rachel said softly, “ . . . come and show me your face.”
The man stepped into the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, as she’d requested, but she could see his form, and it was, as she’d guessed, a fine form: tall and broad.
“Who are you?” she said. Then, when he didn’t reply: “Did you make the fire?”
“Yes.” His voice was soft.
“The smoke . . .”
“ . . . followed you.”
“Yes.”
“I asked it to.”
“You asked the smoke,” she said. It made an unlikely kind of sense to her.
“I wanted it to introduce you to me,” he said. There was a hint of humor in his voice, as though he only half-expected her to believe this. But the half that did believe it believed it utterly.
“Why?” she said.
“Why did I want to meet you?”
“Yes . . .”
“I was curious,” he said. “And so were you.”
“I didn’t even know you were here,” she said. “How could I be curious?”
“You came out to see the fire,” he reminded her.
“I was afraid . . .” she began; but the rest of the thought eluded her. What had she been afraid of?
“You were afraid the wind would blow the sparks . . .”
“Yes . . .” she murmured, vaguely remembering her anxiety.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen,” Galilee reassured her. “Didn’t Niolopua tell you why?”
“No . . .”
“He will,” Galilee replied. Then, more softly. “My poor Niolopua. Do you like him?”
She mused on this for a moment; it hadn’t been something she’d given much thought to. “He seems very gentle,” she said. “But I don’t think he is. I think he’s angry.”
“He has reason,” Galilee replied.
“Everybody hates the Gearys.”
“We all do what we have to do,” he replied.
“And what does Niolopua do? Besides cutting the grass?”
“He brings me here, when I’m needed.”
“How does he do that?”
“We have ways of communicating that aren’t easy to explain,” Galilee said. “But here I am.”
“Okay,” she said. “So now you’re here. Now what?”
There was more than inquiry in her voice. Though her tongue was lazy, the words slow, she knew what she was inviting; she knew what answer she wanted to hear. That he’d come to share her bed, whoever he was; come to exploit the dreamy ease she’d inhaled, and make love to her. Come to kiss her back to life, after an age of thorns and sorrow.
He didn’t give her the answer she expected. At least, not in so many words.
“I want to tell you a story,” he said.
She laughed lightly. “Aren’t I a bit too old for that?”
“No,” he said softly. “Never.”
He was right of course. She was perfectly ready to have him weave a story for her; to let the deep music of his voice shape the colors in her head: give them lives, give them destinies.
“First,” she said, “will you come into the light where I can
see you?”
“That’s part of the story,” he said. “That’s always part of it.”
“Oh . . .” she said, not understanding the principle of this, but accepting that at least for tonight it was true. “Then tell me.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. “Where should I start?” There was a little pause while he considered this. When he spoke again his voice had changed subtly; there was a lilting rhythm in it, as though there was a melody to these words, that he was close to singing.
“Imagine please,” he began, “a country far from here, in a time of plenty, when the rich were kind and the poor had God. In that country there lived a girl called Jerusha, whom this story concerns. She was fifteen at the time when what I’m about to tell you happened, and there was no happier girl in the world. Why? Because she was loved. Her father owned a great house, filled with treasures from the furthest reaches of the empire, but he loved his Jerusha more than anything he owned or anything he ever dreamed of owning. And not a day went by without his telling her so. Now on this particular day, a day in late summer, Jerusha had gone out taking a winding path through the woods to a favorite place of hers: a spot on the banks of the River Zun, which marked the southern perimeter of her father’s land.
“Sometimes in the morning when she visited the riverbank the local women would be there washing their clothes, then spreading them out on the rocks to dry, but the later in the day she went the more likely she was to be there alone. Today, however, though it was late afternoon, she saw—as she wound between the trees—that there was somebody sitting in the water. It was not one of the women. It was a man, or nearly a man, and he was staring dawn at his own reflection in the river. I say he was nearly a man, because although this creature had a man’s shape, and a pretty shape at that, his form glistened strangely in the sunlight, silvery one moment, dark the next.