The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  From Paradise Street

  EXTERIOR. THE WALL. NIGHT. A SOFT WIND IS BLOWING UP FROM THE RIVER. BELLS TINKLE; SNATCHES OF SONG CAN BE HEARD FROM SOMEWHERE FAR OFF. ENTER JUDE. A GROAN.

  JUDE: Who’s there?

  MULROONEY: (Off) Help me.

  JUDE CAUTIOUSLY INVESTIGATES BEHIND THE WALL.

  JUDE: Oh my God.

  MULROONEY: (Off) Ah. Careful.

  JUDE: I’m sorry.

  JUDE AND MULROONEY EMERGE FROM BEHIND THE WALL. MULROONEY HAS A BLOODY NOSE, HIS CLOTHES TORN.

  MULROONEY: (Looking at the blood on his hands) Where am I bleeding from?

  JUDE: (Gives him a handkerchief) Your nose. Here. Where does it hurt?

  MULROONEY: Where doesn’t it?

  JUDE: What did you do? Fall off the wall?

  MULROONEY: Damn fool question. What do I want climbing on a wall?

  Where are my papers?

  HE GOES ROUND THE WALL AGAIN.

  MULROONEY: They’re gone.

  JUDE: The wind must have caught them.

  MULROONEY: Impatient to be off and away from me.

  JUDE: Were they important?

  MULROONEY: Only my life’s work.

  JUDE: It’s a hospital for you —

  MULROONEY: It is not.

  JUDE: You may have broken bones.

  MULROONEY: I can roll with a blow. I’m not moving from here. What time is it?

  JUDE: I don’t know, my watch has stopped. About four in the morning.

  MULROONEY: What’s a woman like you doing out here?

  JUDE: It’s so hot.

  MULROONEY: It is hot.

  JUDE: I had the window open. I heard voices, and music. I looked out, and you know what? Somebody was performing a play in the middle of the street. I went down to find out what they were doing, and they’d gone. Have you noticed the smell?

  MULROONEY: My nose is in no fit state to smell.

  JUDE: There’s a scent, scents, in the air, like flowers; no, not like flowers; like the day before flowers. Some March morning, waking up.

  There’s a green smell in the air.

  MULROONEY: Four o’clock, you say? Oh fuck.

  JUDE: What’s wrong?

  MULROONEY: All my life, I’ve been waiting for one particular train: collecting the timetables, the ticket stubs, the signs of it. And when it comes, where am I? Dead to the world. The visit’s over. It must be. I have to join the queue of people who just missed the miracles. The man who had diarrhea, and missed the Last Supper. The fellow who was blowing his nose when Lazarus took his first breath. Oh God—I think I’ve wet my pants.

  JUDE: You can’t stay here.

  MULROONEY: I’ll walk down to the river.

  JUDE: What for?

  MULROONEY: To throw myself in.

  JUDE: Mulrooney.

  MULROONEY: What do I care if the land sinks, if the whole world’s only fit for fishes? (Yelling, to the sleeping city) Drown, you blind ignorant bastards! Starved of fancy, aren’t you? Gray with truth. Wandering the world up and down. Well, I tried to tell them. Did my best. They took no notice. There’s visions over Dogger Bank, Viking, Forties, lights on the Irish Sea, and all the promise of Jerusalem rolling away to meet the Pole, and do they care?

  JUDE: They dream.

  MULROONEY: (Reluctantly conceding the point) Sure, they do that.

  JUDE: Isn’t that something?

  MULROONEY: I don’t distrust the internal vision. I don’t say what the mind sees is less than what the eye sees. I say there’s a threshold, where one becomes the other. Where the fruit of the mind becomes edible, where the waters of the imagination become available to wash in. The rest is politics, the rest is sociology, the rest is commerce with dissolution and I want none of it.

  APPLAUSE FROM BEHIND THE WALL.

  MULROONEY: Listen to yourself, Mulrooney.

  THE WALL OPENS. A GLORIOUS LIGHT SPILLS OUT ONTO THE FILTHY STREET. MULROONEY HASN’T NOTICED YET. JUDE HAS. SHE’S IN AWE.

  MULROONEY: Piss soaking in your socks and you’re talking like a madman. How long does it take to drown?

  IN THE ROSY HEART OF THE LIGHT STANDS GLORIANA HERSELF, ELIZABETH I, WITH HER MANDRILL, BENNY. ON A SILVER CHAIN. BEHIND HER STAND ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX. AND LUCY LOVELACE, HERLADY-IN-WAITING.

  ELIZABETH: We applaud your sentiments.

  MULROONEY: They’re not sentiments; they’re accusations.

  JUDE: Mulrooney. I don’t think you missed the miracle after all.

  MULROONEY: What? (Turns)

  ESSEX: Bow your head, you heathen. You stand before Her Majesty

  Queen Elizabeth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

  LUCY: (To Jude) Curtsy.

  JUDE: (Curtsies) What am I doing?

  MULROONEY: Do you know you’re the spitting image of somebody?

  ELIZABETH: We are Gloriana.

  MULROONEY: Been to a party have you? Fancy dress, is it? (To Jude) Or are these maybe the actors you saw in the street? The monkey’s very-fine, by the way.

  ELIZABETH: (To Essex) It’s a pretty irony when the entertainment presumes the patron to be on show.

  MULROONEY: I’m no entertainment.

  ELIZABETH: It was certainly a well-written speech you just delivered.

  MULROONEY: I’m suicidal is what I am. It’s the right of every man within an ace of dying to say his piece.

  ELIZABETH: Your name’s Mulrooney?

  MULROONEY: Yes.

  ESSEX: Acknowledge Her Majesty.

  ELIZABETH: Hush, Robin —

  ESSEX: Ma’am, he has not so much as bowed his head.

  MULROONEY: Breed pimps with a bit of bite these days, don’t they?

  ELIZABETH: (To Jude) You?

  JUDE: What?

  ELIZABETH: Who are you?

  JUDE: Jude Colquhoun.

  ELIZABETH: Scottish name.

  JUDE: Is this a joke?

  ELIZABETH: Of course, you don’t expect us.

  MULROONEY: The woman’s drunk.

  ESSEX: (Unsheathing his sword) What?

  ELIZABETH: Robin —

  MULROONEY: Oh Lord, where’s Jonson? He swore he’d keep you off my back.

  JUDE: Who are you?

  ELIZABETH: We are Elizabeth. Queen of—

  MULROONEY: Drunk. Every one of them.

  JUDE: She’s been dead four hundred years.

  ELIZABETH: We were dead before we were born, yet we were born.

  ESSEX: This is Her Infinite Majesty.

  ELIZABETH: Absolute Majesty. ESSEX: In flesh and blood.

  JUDE: And you?

  ESSEX: I am Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. You may touch me if you doubt it —

  JUDE: No thank you. Why have you no shoes on?

  ELIZABETH: It is our punishment. We are displeased with him in the matter of Ireland.

  MULROONEY: Ireland is it?

  ELIZABETH: He has mislaid several thousand good Englishmen in that country.

  ESSEX: No man could have done better, ma’am.

  ELIZABETH: That’s not our opinion. Our opinion is that you were both arbitrary and vicious. Until he solves the Irish question he will go barefoot.

  MULROONEY: Then his cobbler will get no more business from him.

  ESSEX: I bristle, ma’am. Allow me to cut this Irish clod in two.

  MULROONEY: (Re Essex’s sword) Have you got a license for that, by the way?

  ESSEX: Every Irishman is half phlegm and half mud.

  MULROONEY: And what are you, her bum-boy?

  ESSEX: No more!

  ESSEX STEPS FORWARD AND SWIFTLY BRINGS MULROONEY TO THE FLOOR, HIS SWORD-POINT TO MULROONEY’S NECK.

  ESSEX: This is where you belong.

  MULROONEY: You bloody coward! I’m unarmed!

  JUDE: Leave him alone!

  ESSEX: May I dispatch him?

  ELIZABETH: You may not.

  ESSEX: Ma’am, he as good as called me a catamite.

  ELIZABETH: If you harm him, Robin, we’ll have you beh
eaded again. And this time we won’t be so quick to resurrect you.

  JUDE: This isn’t funny anymore. Stop it. ELIZABETH: You still think this is a pretense?

  JUDE: Of course.

  ELIZABETH: Touch us, Jude. Come on. Close to us. Touch our skin. Are we warm?

  JUDE: That doesn’t prove anything.

  ELIZABETH: Touch us.

  JUDE IS INTIMIDATED. BUT SHE TOUCHES ELIZABETH.

  JUDE: Lord, you smell. Powder and sweat a year old.

  ELIZABETH: We don’t like to bathe. It is our opinion it takes the youthful vigor out of us.

  JUDE: Mulrooney.

  MULROONEY: Yes?

  JUDE: Suppose it is her. Just … suppose.

  MULROONEY: Then you’re welcome to her.

  JUDE: Suppose this is your miracle. Not out of the sky, but out of the past.

  Why are you here?

  ELIZABETH: We’ve come to look at England. And if it suits us, to unmake it. We do not like what we see. Not remotely. This was a glorious country in our age. It could have been Paradise on earth.

  JUDE: And how do you intend to change it?

  ELIZABETH: With daughters. A country’s like a body. A system of physical states, a geography of entrails, limbs, and bones. A head: us. A trunk: the people. A hand to fight: the army. A hand to trade with: the merchants. A leg to hop to heaven on: the Church. Another to skip to hell on: government. Now, look at this England. It is a body at war with itself. It bites its own tongue, so its voice is half sores, it tears out its hair, it weeps, it bleeds, it bleeds and weeps again. Now ask yourself, what sex is this body, England? Male. The army, male. The Church, male. Philosophy, commerce, government, male, male, all male. So, I say, if the male body cannot live without mutilating itself, setting its parts in war against each other, dividing head from heart from lung from stomach, then let us unsex it. Tear off its manhood and fling it into France, dig a hole where our men built towers; no longer aspire to being steel, but make a glory of love’s body, where we shall be pocketed in peace, where the rule of Venus is law, and every breath is pleasure.

  MULROONEY: I thought she was the Virgin Queen.

  ESSEX UNSHEATHES HIS SWORD.

  ESSEX: One more word —

  ELIZABETH: You apologize for that.

  MULROONEY: If you’re Elizabeth the First, I’m Mickey Mouse.

  ELIZABETH: That’s your fucking problem. Now apologize. Or your neck will wonder where your head went.

  JUDE: A very male display, ma’am, if I may say so.

  ELIZABETH: What?

  JUDE: You were saying something about being pocketed in peace.

  ELIZABETH: We must have them in their place, or they’ll tread on us. (To Mulrooney) Apologize!

  JUDE: (To Mulrooney) She means it.

  MULROONEY: I won’t do it.

  JUDE: I’m squeamish. Do it. For me.

  MULROONEY: (Reluctantly) Oh Christ. All right. Yes. ELIZABETH: Yes what?

  MULROONEY: I apologize.

  ELIZABETH: Very nice. That was much to our pleasure. You may kiss us, and leave.

  JUDE: (Reluctantly) Go on.

  MULROONEY KISSES HER HAND. ELIZABETH DOESN’T LET GO OF IT.

  MULROONEY: Can I have my hand back? ELIZABETH: What age are you?

  MULROONEY: Forty-one.

  ELIZABETH: I’m sick of boys, Jack Mulrooney. My appetite is for wisdom without platitudes, and a bed without lust. Your hand is shaking. “Cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.”

  MULROONEY: My Latin’s shite. What did she say?

  ESSEX: Tomorrow … er …

  ELIZABETH: “Tomorrow may he love who has never loved before, and may he who has loved love too.”

  SHE LETS MULROONEY GO. HE LOOKS AT HER AS SHE BACKS AWAY.

  ELIZABETH: Go to bed. Dream of us.

  MULROONEY: Not if I can help it.

  MULROONEY EXITS.

  ELIZABETH: (To Jude) Your business is the pox?

  JUDE: Yes.

  ELIZABETH: Tomorrow, we will debate syphilis.

  JUDE: We will?

  ELIZABETH: We will. We’ve learned much already, being here. This age is America’s, as the age before was ours, as the age before that was Bethlehem’s. We shan’t be great as we were; but greatness is defined by men, who mean a metaphor for how full they find their codpieces. I say, we shall not be great, but deep, as our cunts, and moist and mighty. You will attend on us tomorrow. ‘Til then, goodnight. EXIT ELIZABETH, HAVING PETTED HER APE, AND PASSED IT TO ESSEX.

  JUDE: What am I smiling for?

  From The Great and Secret Show

  At first, it was drudgery. Pure hell, day after day, going through the sacks.

  The piles didn’t seem to diminish. Indeed they were several times fed by a leering Homer, who led a trail of peons in with further satchels to swell the number.

  First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed) from dull; then the private correspondence from official, and the scrawl from the Palmer method. Those decisions made, he began opening the envelopes, in the first week with his fingers, till his fingers became callused, thereafter with a short-bladed knife he bought especially for the purpose, digging out the contents like a pearl-fisher in search of a pearl, most of the time finding nothing, sometimes, as Homer had promised, finding money or a check, which he dutifully declared to his boss.

  “You’re good at this,” Homer said after the second week. “You’re really good. Maybe I should put you on this full time.”

  Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he’d said that too many times to bosses who’d fired him the minute after, and he couldn’t afford to lose this job: not with the rent to pay and heating his one-room apartment costing a damn fortune while the snow continued to fall. Besides, something was happening to him while he passed the solitary hours in the Dead Letter Room, something it took him to the end of the third week to begin to enjoy, and the end of the fifth to comprehend.

  He was sitting at the crossroads of America.

  Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn’t the geographical center of the USA, but as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.

  The lines of communication crossed, and recrossed, and finally dropped their orphans here, because nobody in any other state wanted them. These letters had been sent from coast to coast looking for someone to open them, and had found no takers. Finally they’d ended with him: with Randolph Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken and rage not expressed, whose little knife slit them, and little eyes scanned them, and who—sitting at his crossroads—began to see the private face of the nation.

  There were love letters, hate letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets on which men had drawn round their hard-ons, Valentines of pubic hair, blackmail by wives, journalists, hustlers, lawyers, and senators, junk mail and suicide notes, lost novels, chain letters, résumés, undelivered gifts, rejected gifts, letters sent out into the wilderness like bottles from an island, in the hope of finding help, poems, threats, and recipes. So much. But these were the least of it. Though sometimes the love letters got him sweaty, and the ransom notes made him wonder if, having gone unanswered, their senders had murdered their hostages; the stories of love and death they told touched him only fleetingly. Far more persuasive, far more moving, was another story, which could not be articulated so easily.

  Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a secret life; one which he’d never even glimpsed before. Love and death he knew about. Love and death were the great clichés; the twin obsessions of songs and soap operas. But there was another life, which every fortieth letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every thousandth stated with a lunatic plainness. When they said it plain, it was not the whole truth, but it was a beginning, and each of the writers had their own mad way of stating something close to unstatable.

  What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not remotely as it seemed. Forces conspired (g
overnmental, religious, medical) to conceal and silence those who had more than a passing grasp of that fact, but they couldn’t gag or incarcerate every one of them. There were men and women who slipped the nets, however widely flung; who found backroads to travel where their pursuers got lost, and safe houses along the way where they’d be fed and watered by like visionaries, ready to misdirect the dogs when they came sniffing. These people didn’t trust Ma Bell, so they didn’t use telephones. They didn’t dare assemble in groups of more than two for fear of attracting attention to themselves. But they wrote. Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the secrets they kept sealed up were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they knew the hunters were on their heels and they’d have no other chance to describe the world to itself before they were caught, drugged, and locked up. Sometimes there was even a subversive glee in the scrawlings, sent out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the hope that the letter would blow the mind of some innocent who’d received it by chance. Some of the missives were stream-of-consciousness rantings, others precise, even clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside out by sex-magic or mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National Enquirer stories to veil another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zombie cults; news from Venusian evangelists and psychics who tuned into the dead on the TV. But after a few weeks of studying these letters (and study it was; he was like a man locked in the ultimate library) Jaffe began to see beyond the nonsenses to the hidden story. He broke the code; or enough of it to be tantalized. Instead of being irritated each day when Homer opened the door and had another half-dozen satchels of letters brought in, he welcomed the addition. The more letters, the more clues; the more clues the more hope he had of a solution to the mystery. It was, he became more certain as the weeks turned into months and the winter mellowed, not several mysteries but one. The writers whose letters were about the Veil, and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward toward revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but somewhere in the cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.

  It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor about death, as a literalist would have understood the term. It was—in no particular order—something to do with fishes, and the sea (sometimes the Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known all along was some other place. It was about the end of the World, which was in turn about its beginning. And it was about Art.