by Clive Barker
“You eat bird meat, presumably,” Jacob said.
Of course he did. He enjoyed fried chicken, and turkey at Christmas. He’d even had a piece of the pigeon pie Adele had made once she’d explained that the pigeon wasn’t the filthy kind he knew from Manchester. “I love it,” he said, the notion of this deed easier when he thought of a barbecued chicken leg. “How will I know which birds you want me to …”
“You can say it.”
“… kill?”
“I’ll point them out, don’t worry. It’s as you say: easy.” He had said that, hadn’t he? Now he had to make good on the boast. “Be careful with this,” Jacob said, passing the knife to him. “It’s uncommonly sharp.”
He received the weapon gingerly. Was there some charge passed through its blade into his marrow? He thought so. It was subtle, to be sure, but when his hand tightened around the hilt he felt as though he knew the knife like a friend; as though he and it had some long-standing knowledge of one another.
“Good,” Jacob said, seeing Will fearlessly clasping the weapon. “You look as if you mean business.”
Will grinned. He did; no doubt of it. Whatever business this knife was capable of, he meant.
They were at the fringes of the wood now, and with the clouds parted, the starlight polished every snow-laden twig and branch until it glittered. There remained in Will a remote tic of apprehension regarding the deed ahead—or rather, his competency in the doing of it; he entertained no doubts about the killing itself—but he showed no sign of this to Jacob. He strode between the trees a pace ahead of his companion, and was all at once enveloped in a silence so profound it made him hold his breath for fear of breaking it.
A little way behind him, Jacob said: “Take it slowly. Enjoy the moment.”
Will’s knife-hand had a strange agitation in it, however. It didn’t want any delay. It wanted to be at work, now.
“Where are they?” Will whispered.
Jacob put his hand on the back of Will’s neck. “Just look,” he murmured, and though nothing actually changed in the scene before them, at Jacob’s words Will saw it with a sudden simplicity, his gaze blazing through the lattice of branches and mesh of brambles, through the glamour of sparkling frost and starlit air, to the heart of this place. Or rather to what seemed to him at that moment its heart: two birds, huddled in a niche at the juncture of branch and trunk. Their eyes were wide and bright (he could see them blinking, even though they were ten yards from him) and their heads were cocked.
“They see me,” Will breathed.
“See them back.”
“I do.”
“Fix them with your eyes.”
“I am.”
“Then finish it. Go on.”
Jacob pushed him lightly, and lightly Will went, like a phantom in fact, over the decorated ground. His eyes were fixed on the birds every step of the way. They were plain creatures. Two bundles of ragged brown feathers, with a sliver of sheeny blue in their wings. No more remarkable than the moths he’d killed in the Courthouse, he thought. He didn’t hurry toward them. He took his time, despite the impatience in his hand, feeling as though he were gliding down a tunnel toward his target, which was the only thing in focus before him. If they fled now, they still could not escape him; of that he was certain. They were in the tunnel with him, trapped by his hunter’s will. They might flutter, they might peck, but he would have their lives whatever they did.
He was perhaps three strides from the tree—raising his arm to slit their throats—when one of the pair took sudden flight. His knife-hand astonished him. Up it sped, a blur in front of his face, and before his eyes could even find the bird the knife had already transfixed it. Though strictly speaking it had not been his doing, he felt proud of the deed.
Look at me! he thought, knowing Jacob was watching him. Wasn’t that quick? Wasn’t that beautiful?
The second bird was rising now, while the first flapped like a toy on a stick. He hadn’t time to free the blade. He just let his left hand do as the right had done, and up it went like five-fingered lightning to strike the bird from the air. Down the creature tumbled, landing belly up at Will’s feet. His blow had broken its neck. It feebly flapped its wings a moment, shitting itself. Then it died.
Will looked at its mate. In the time it had taken to kill the second bird, the first had also perished. Its blood, running down the blade, was hot on his hand.
Easy, he thought, just as he’d said it would be. A moment ago they’d been blinking their eyes and cocking their heads, hearts beating. Now they were dead, both of them; spilled and broken. Easy.
“What you’ve just done is irreversible,” said Jacob, laying his hands upon Will’s shoulders from behind. “Think of that.” His touch was no longer light. “This is not a world of resurrections. They’ve gone. Forever.”
“I know.”
“No you don’t,” Jacob said. There was as much weight in his words as in his palms. “Not yet, you don’t. You see them dead before you, but knowing what that means takes a little time.” He lifted his left hand from Will’s shoulder, and reached around his body. “May I have my knife back? If you’re sure you’ve finished with it, that is.”
Will slid the bird off the blade, bloodying the fingers of his other hand in the doing, and tossed the corpse down beside its mate. Then he wiped the knife clean on the arm of his jacket—an impressively casual gesture, he thought—and passed it back into Jacob’s care, as cautiously as he’d been lent it.
“Suppose I were to tell you,” Jacob said softly, almost mournfully, “that these two things at your feet—which you so efficiently dispatched—were the last of their kind?”
“The last birds?”
“No,” Jacob said, indulgently. “Nothing so ambitious. Just the last of these birds.” “Are they?”
“Suppose they were,” Jacob replied. “How would you feel?”
“I don’t know,” Will said, quite honestly. “I mean, they’re just birds.”
“Oh now,” Jacob chided, “think again.”
Will obeyed. And as had happened several times in Steep’s presence, his mind grew strange to itself, filling with thoughts it had never dared before. He looked down at his guilty hands, and the blood seemed to throb on them, as though the memory of the bird’s pulse was still in it. And while he looked he turned over what Jacob had just said.
Suppose they were the last, the very last, and the deed he’d just done irreversible. No resurrections here. Not tonight; not ever. Suppose they were the last, blue and brown. The last that would ever hop that way, sing that way, court and mate and make more birds who hopped and sang and courted that way.
“Oh …,” he murmured, beginning to understand. “I … changed the world a little bit, didn’t I?” He turned and looked up at Jacob. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what I did! I changed the world.”
“Maybe …,” Jacob said. There was a tiny smile of satisfaction on his face, that his pupil was so swift. “If these were the last, perhaps it was more than a little.”
“Are they?” Will said. “The last, I mean?”
“Would you like them to be?” Will wanted it too much for words. All he could do was nod. “Another night, perhaps,” Jacob said. “But not tonight. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but these”— he looked down at the bodies in the grass—”are as common as moths.” Will felt as though he’d just been given a present, and found it was just an empty box. “I know how it is, Will. What you’re feeling now. Your hands tell you you’ve done something wonderful, but you look around and nothing much seems to have changed. Am I right?”
“Yes,” he said. He suddenly wanted to wipe the worthless blood off his hands. They’d been so quick and so clever; they deserved better. The blood of something rare; something whose passing would be of consequence. He bent down and, plucking up a fistful of sharp grass, began to scrub his palms clean.
“So what do we do now?” he said as he worked. “I don’t want to stay here any longer. I w
ant to …”
He didn’t finish his chatter, however, for at that moment a ripple passed through the air surrounding them, as though the earth itself had expelled a tiny breath. He ceased his scrubbing and slowly rose to his feet, letting the grass drop.
“What was that?” he whispered.
“You did it, not I,” Jacob replied. There was a tone in his voice Will had not heard before, and it wasn’t comforting.
“What did I do?” Will said, looking all around for some explanation. But there was nothing that hadn’t been there all along. Just the trees, and the snow and the stars.
“I don’t want this,” Jacob was murmuring. “Do you hear me? I don’t want this.” All the weight had vanished from his voice; so had the certainty.
Will looked around at him. Saw his stricken face. “Don’t want what?” Will asked him.
Jacob turned his fretful gaze in Will’s direction. “You’ve more power in you than you realize, boy,” he said. “A lot more.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Will protested.
“You’re a conduit.”
“I’m a what?”
“Damn it, why didn’t I see? Why didn’t I see?” He backed away from Will, as the air shook again, more violently than before. “Oh Christ in Heaven. I don’t want this.”
His anguish made Will panic. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear from his idol. He’d done all he’d been asked to do. He’d killed the birds, cleaned and returned the knife; even put a brave face on his disappointment. So why was his deliverer retreating from him as though Will were a rabid dog?
“Please …,” he said to Steep, “I didn’t mean it, whatever it was I did, I’m sorry …”
But Jacob just continued to retreat. “It’s not you. It’s us. I don’t want your eves going where I’ve been. Not there, at least. Not to him. Not to Thomas —”
He was starting to babble again, and Will, certain his savior was about to run, and equally certain that once he was gone it would be over between them, reached and grabbed hold of the man’s sleeve. Jacob cried out, and tried to shake himself free, but in doing so Will’s hand, seeking better purchase, caught hold of his fingers. Their touching had made Will strong before; he’d climbed the hill light-footed because Jacob’s flesh had been laid on his. But the business of the knife had wrought some change in him. He was no longer a passive recipient of strength. His bloodied fingers had been granted talents of their own, and he could not control them. He heard Jacob cry out a second time. Or was it his own voice? No, it was both. Two sobs, rising as though from a single throat.
Jacob had been right to be afraid. The same rippling breath that had distracted Will from cleaning his hands was here again, increased a hundredfold, and this time it inhaled the very world in which they stood. Earth and sky shuddered and were in an instant reconfigured, leaving them each in their terror: Will sobbing that he did not know what was happening; Jacob, that he did.
From The Thief of Always
Harvey said nothing about his peculiar visitor to either his mom or his dad, in case they put locks on the windows to stop Rictus returning to the house. But the trouble with keeping the visit a secret was that after a few days Harvey began to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep at the window, he thought, and Rictus had simply been a dream.
He kept hoping nevertheless. “Watch for me,” Rictus had said, and Harvey did just that. He watched from the window of his room. He watched from his desk at school. He even watched with one eye when he was lying on his pillow at night. But Rictus didn’t show.
And then, about a week after that first visit, just as Harvey’s hope was waning, his watchfulness was rewarded. On his way to school one foggy morning he heard a voice above his head, and looked up to see Rictus floating down from the clouds, his coat swelled up around him so that he looked fatter than a prize pig.
“Howya doin’?” he said, as he descended.
“I was starting to think I’d invented you,” Harvey replied. “You know, like a dream.”
“I get that a lot,” Rictus said, his smile wider than ever. “Particularly from the ladies. You’re a dream come true, they say.” He winked. “And who am I to argue? You like my shoes?”
Harvey looked down at Rictus’s bright blue shoes. They were quite a sight, and he said so.
“I got given ‘em by my boss,” Rictus said. “He’s very happy you’re going to come visit. So, are you ready?”
“Well …”
“It’s no use wasting time,” Rictus said. “There may not be room for you tomorrow.”
“Can I just ask one question?”
“I thought we agreed—”
“I know. But just one.”
“All right. One.”
“Is this place far from here?”
“Nah. It’s just across town.”
“So I’d only be missing a couple of hours of school?”
“That’s two questions,” Rictus said.
“No, I’m just thinking out loud.”
Rictus grunted. “Look,” he said, “I’m not here to do a great song and dance persuading you. I got a friend called Jive does that. I’m just a smiler. I smile, and I say: Come with me to the Holiday House, and if folks don’t want to come—” He shrugged. “Hey, it’s their hard luck.”
With that, he turned his back on Harvey.
“Wait!” Harvey protested. “I want to come. But just for a little while.”
“You can stay as long as you like,” Rictus said. “Or as little. All I want to do is take that glum expression off your face and put one of these up there.” His grin grew even larger. “Is there any crime in that?”
“No,” said Harvey. “That’s no crime. I’m glad you found me. I really am.”
So what if he missed all of the morning at school, he thought, it’d be no great loss. Maybe an hour or two of the afternoon as well. As long as he was back home by three. Or four. Certainly before dark.
“I’m ready to go,” he said to Rictus. “Lead the way.”
Millsap, the town in which Harvey had lived all his life, wasn’t very big, and he thought he’d seen just about all of it over the years. But the streets he knew were soon behind them, and though Rictus was setting a fair speed Harvey made sure he kept a mental list of landmarks along the way, in case he had to find his way home on his own. A butcher’s shop with two pigs’ heads hanging from hooks; a church with a yard full of old tombs beside it; the statue of some dead general, covered from hat to stirrups in pigeon dung: all these sights and more he noted and filed away.
And while they walked, Rictus kept up a stream of idle chatter.
“I hate the fog! Just hate it!” he said. “And there’ll be rain by noon. We’ll be out of it, of course …” He went on from talk of rain to the state of the streets. “Look at this trash, all over the sidewalk! It’s shameful! And the mud! It’s making a fine old mess of my shoes!”
He had plenty more to say, but none of it was very enlightening, so after a while Harvey gave up listening. How far was this Holiday House, he began to wonder. The fog was chilling him, and his legs were aching. If they didn’t get there soon, he was going to turn back.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Rictus.
“I bet you don’t.”
“You’re thinking this is all a trick. You’re thinking Rictus is leading you on a mystery tour and there’s nothing at the end of it. Isn’t that true?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Well, my boy, I’ve got news for you. Look up ahead.”
He pointed, and there—not very far from where they stood—was a high wall, which was so long that it disappeared into the fog to right and left.
“What do you see?” Rictus asked him.
“A wall,” Harvey replied, though the more he stared at it the less certain of this he was. The stones, which had seemed solid enough at first sight, now looked to be shifting and wavering, as though they’d been chiseled from the fog it
self, and piled up here to keep out prying eyes.
“It looks like a wall,” Harvey said, “but it’s not a wall.”
“You’re very observant,” Rictus replied admiringly. “Most people just see a dead end, so they turn around and take another street.”
“But not us.”
“No, not us. We’re going to keep on walking. You know why?”
“Because the Holiday House is on the other side?”
“What a mir-ac-u-lous kid you are!” Rictus replied. “That’s exactly right. Are you hungry, by the way?”
“Starving.”
“Well, there’s a woman waiting for you in the House called Mrs. Griffin, and let me tell you, she is the greatest cook in all of Americaland. I swear, on my tailor’s grave. Anything you can dream of eating, she can cook. All you have to do is ask. Her deviled eggs—” He smacked his lips. “Perfection.”
“I don’t see a gate,” Harvey said.
“That’s because there isn’t one.”
“So how do we get in?”
“Just keep walking!”
Half out of hunger, half out of curiosity, Harvey did as Rictus had instructed, and as he came within three steps of the wall a gust of balmy, flower-scented wind slipped between the shimmering stones and kissed his cheek. Its warmth was welcome after his long, cold trek, and he picked up his pace, reaching out to touch the wall as he approached it. The misty stones seemed to reach for him in their turn, wrapping their soft, gray arms around his shoulders, and ushering him through the wall.
He looked back, but the street he’d stepped out of, with its gray sidewalks and gray clouds, had already disappeared. Beneath his feet the grass was high and full of flowers. Above his head, the sky was midsummer blue. And ahead of him, set at the summit of a great slope, was a house that had surely been first imagined in a dream.
He didn’t wait to see if Rictus was coming after him, nor to wonder how the gray beast February had been slain and this warm day risen in its place. He simply let out a laugh that Rictus would have been proud of, and hurried up the slope and into the shadow of the dream house.