by Clive Barker
A motion at the door distracted her gaze momentarily. The air around them was close to dropping its sham of sights altogether, and the scene beyond the circle was blurred. But there was enough color in the suit of the man at the threshold for her to know him even though she couldn’t make out his face. Who else but Dowd wore that absurd shade of apricot? She said his name, and though she heard no sound from her throat, Oscar understood her alarm and turned toward the door.
Dowd was approaching the circle at speed, his intention perfectly clear: to hitch a ride to the Second Dominion. She’d seen the gruesome consequences of such interference before, on this very spot, and she braced herself against Oscar for the coming shock. Instead of trusting to the circle to dispatch the hanger-on, however, Oscar turned from her and went to strike Dowd. The circle’s flux multiplied his violence tenfold, and the glyph of his body became an illegible scrawl, the colors dirtied in an instant. The pain she’d thought washed away swept back over her. Blood ran from her nose and into her open mouth. Her skin itched so violently she’d have brought blood to that too had the pain in her joints not kept her from moving.
She could make no sense of the scribble in front of her until her glance caught sight of Oscar’s face, smeared and raw, screaming back at her as he toppled from the circle. She reached to haul him back, despite the searing pain her motion brought, and took hold of an arm, determined that wherever they were delivered, to Yzordderrex or death, they’d go there together. He returned her grasp, seizing her outstretched arms and dragging himself back onto the Express. As his face emerged from the blur beyond the smile she realized her error. It was Dowd she’d hauled aboard.
She let go of her hold, in revulsion more than rage. His face was horribly contorted, blood streaming from eyes, ears, and nose. But the mind of passage was already working on this fresh text, preparing to translate and transport it. She had no way of braking the process, and to leave the circle now would be certain suicide. Beyond it, the scene was blurred and darkening, but she caught sight of Oscar, rising from the ground, and thanked whatever deities protected these circles that he was at least alive. He was moving toward the circle again, she saw, as though to dare its flux a second time, but it seemed he judged the train to be moving too swiftly now, because he retreated, arms up over his face. Seconds later the whole scene disappeared, the sunlight at the threshold burning on for a heartbeat longer than the rest, then that too folding away into obscurity.
The only sight left to her now was the matrix of lines which were the translator’s rendering of her fellow traveler, and though she despised him beyond words she kept her eyes fixed upon them, having no other point of reference. All bodily sensation had disappeared. She didn’t know if she was floating, falling, or even breathing, though she suspected she was doing none of these things. She had become a sign, transmitted between Dominions, encoded in the mind of passage. The sight before her—Dowd’s shimmering glyph—was not secured by sight but by thought, which was the only currency valid on this trip. And now, as if her powers to purchase were increasing with familiarity, the absence around her began to gain detail. The In Ovo, Oscar had called this place. Its darkness swelled in a million places, their skins stretching until they gleamed and split, glutinous forms breaking out and in their turn swelling and splitting, like fruit whose seeds were sown inside each other and nourished to corruption by their predecessors’ decay. Repulsive as this was, there was worse to come, as new entities appeared, these no more than scraps from a cannibal’s table, sucked bloodless and gnawed: idiot doodles of life that didn’t bear translation into any material form. Primitive though they were, they sensed the presence of finished life forms in their midst and rose toward the travelers like the damned to passing angels. But they swarmed too late. The visitors moved on and away, the darknesses sealing up their tenants and receding.
Jude could see Dowd’s body in the midst of his glyph, still insubstantial but brightening by the moment. With the sight, the agonies of ferriage returned, though not as sharply as those that had pained her at the outset of the journey. She was glad to have them if they proved her nerves were hers again; surely it meant the journey was almost over. The horrors of the In Ovo had almost disappeared entirely when she felt the faint heat on her face. But the scent this heat raised to her nostrils brought more certain proof that the city was near: a mingling of the sweets and sours she’d first smelled on the wind that had issued from the Retreat months before.
She saw a smile come over Dowel’s face, cracking the blood already dried on it: a smile which became a laugh in a beat or two, ringing off the walls of the merchant Peccable’s cellar as it grew solid around them. She didn’t want to share his pleasure, after all the harms he’d devised, but she couldn’t help herself. Relief that the journey hadn’t killed her, and sheer exhilaration that after all this time she was here, brought laughter onto her face and, with every breath between, the air of the Second Dominion into her lungs.
From Everville
But the heat went out of the world even before August was over, and by the end of the third week, with the Blue Mountains not yet visible even to the keenest eye, and food so severely rationed that some were too weak to walk, the word had spread around the campfires that according to friendly natives, storms of unseasonal severity were already descending from the heights. Sheldon Sturgis, who had led the train thus far with a loose hand (some said that was his style; others that he was simply weak and prone to drink), now began to hasten along those who were slowing progress. But with a growing number of frail and sickened pioneers, mistakes and accidents proliferated, adding to the delays that were an inevitable part of such journeys: wheels lost, animals injured, trails blocked.
Death became a fellow traveler sometime in early September, that was Maeve’s belief. She did not see him at first, but she was certain of his presence. He was in the land around them, killing living things with his touch or his breath. Trees that should have been fruitful in this season had already given up their leaves and were going naked. Animals large and small could be seen dead or dying beside the trail. Only carcass-flies were getting fat this September; but then Death was a friend to flies, wasn’t he?
At night, waiting for sleep to come, she could hear people praying in the wagons nearby, begging God to keep Death at bay.
It did no good. He came anyway. To Marsha Winthrop’s baby son, William, who had been born in Missouri just two weeks before the trek began. To Jack Pottruck’s father, a beast of a man like his son, who suddenly weakened and perished in the middle of the night (not quietly, like the Winthrop child, but with terrible cries and imprecations). To the sisters Brenda and Meriel Schonberg, spinsters both, whose passing was only discovered when the train stopped at dusk and their wagon went unhalted, the women being dead at the reins.
Maeve could not help wonder why Death had chosen these particular souls. She could understand why he had taken her mother: she had been very beautiful and gracious and loving. He had wanted to make the world the poorer by removing her, and himself the richer. But what did he want with a baby and an old man and two withered sisters?
She didn’t bother her father with such questions; he was fretful and beset enough. Though their wagon showed no sign of failing, and their horse was as healthy as any in the train, it was clear from the look in his sunken eves that he too knew Death was an unwelcome outrider these days. She began to watch for the horseman more clearly, hoping to reassure her father by identifying the enemy; to say, I know the color of his horse and of his hat, and if he comes near us I’ll know him and frighten him off with a prayer or a song. More than once she thought she caught sight of him, weaving between the wagons up ahead, dark in the dust. But she was never certain of any sighting, so she kept her silence rather than give her father an unverified report.
And the days passed, and the cold deepened, and when finally the Blue Mountains came into view, their slopes were white down below the tree line, and the clouds behind them black and brui
sed by their burden of ice.
And Abilene Welsh and Billy Baxter, whose antics in the summer had been the subject of much gossip (and clucking from Martha Winthrop), were found frozen in each other’s arms one morning, touched by death as they enjoyed each other’s company away from the warmth of the fires. Even as they were being buried, and Doc Hodder was speaking of how they would be eternally united in the Kingdom of the Lord, and those sins they might have committed in the name of love forgiven, Maeve looked up at the gray heavens and saw the first flakes of snow spiraling down. And that was the beginning of the end.
She gave up looking for Death the Outrider after that. If he had ever accompanied the wagons on horseback, as she’d suspected, he had now put off that shape. He had become simpler. He was ice.
It killed many of the travelers quickly, and those it did not kill it tormented with intimations of the state ahead. It slowed the brain and the blood; it made the fingers fumble and the feet numb; it stiffened the sinews; it lined the lungs with a dusting of frost.
Sometimes, even now, with so many people dead and the rest dying, Maeve would hear her father say: “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” as though some promise had been made to him that was presently being broken. She did not doubt the identity of the promise-maker. Mr. Buddenbaum. It was he who had filled her father’s heart with ambition, who had given him gifts and told him to go West and build. It was he who had first whispered the word Everville. Perhaps, she began to think, Whitney had been right. Perhaps the Devil had come to tempt her father in the form of Mr. Buddenbaum, and filled his trusting heart with dreams for the pleasure of watching that heart broken. The problem vexed her night and day—never more so than when her father, in the midst of the storm—leaned over to her and said: “We must be strong, sweet. We mustn’t die, or Everville dies with us!”
Hunger and exhaustion had her teetering on delirium now—sometimes she would imagine herself on the ship coming from Liverpool, clinging to the icy deck with her fingertips; sometimes she was back in Ireland, eating grass and roots to keep her belly from aching—but in times of lucidity she wondered if perhaps this was some kind of test; Buddenbaum’s way of seeing whether the man to whom he’d given the dream of Everville was strong enough to survive. The notion seemed so plausible she could not keep it to herself.
“Papa?” she said, grabbing hold of his coat.
Her father looked round at her, his face barely visible beneath his hood. She could only see one of his eyes, but it looked at her as lovingly as ever.
“What, child?” he said.
“I think maybe—maybe it was meant to be this way.”
“What are you saving?”
“Maybe Mr. Buddenbaum’s watching us, to see if we deserve to build his city. Maybe just when we think we can’t go on any longer he’ll appear, and tell us it was a test, and show us the way to the valley.”
“This isn’t a test, child. It’s just what happens in the world. Dreams die. The cold comes out of nowhere and kills them.” He put his arm around his daughter, and hugged her to him, though there was precious little strength left in him.
“I’m not afraid, Papa,” she said.
“Are you not?”
“No I’m not. We’ve come a long way together.”
“That we have.”
“Remember how it was back at home? How we thought we’d die of starvation? But we didn’t. Then on the ship. Waves washing people overboard to right and left of us, and we thought we’d drown for certain. But the waves passed us by. Didn’t they?”
His cracked, white lips managed a tiny smile. “Yes, child, they did.”
“Mr. Buddenbaum knew what we’d come through,” Maeve said. “He knew there were angels watching over us. And Mama too—”
She felt her father shudder at her side. “I dreamed of her last night—” he said.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Always. We were floating, side by side, in this calm, calm sea. And I swear, if I’d not known you were here, child, waiting for me—”
He didn’t finish the thought. A sound like a single blast of a trumpet came out of the blind whiteness ahead; a note of triumph that instantly raised a chorus of shouts from the wagons in front and behind.
“Did ya hear that?”
“There’s somebody up here with us!”
Another blast now, and another, and another, each rising from the echo of the last till the whole white world was filled with brazen harmonies.
The Sturgises’ wagon, which was ahead of the O’Connells’, had come to a halt, and Sheldon was calling back down the line, summoning a party of men to his side.
“Stratton! Whitney! O’Connell! Get your guns!”
“Guns?” said Maeve. “Papa, why does he want guns?”
“Just climb up into the wagon, child,” Harmon said, “and stay there till I come back.”
The din of trumpets had died away for a moment, but now it came again, more magnificent than ever. As she climbed up onto the wagon, Maeve’s skinny frame ran with little tremors at the sound, as though the music was shaking her muscles and marrow. She started to weep, seeing her father disappear, rifle in hand. Not because she feared for him but because she wanted to go out into the snow herself and see what manner of trumpet made the sound that moved in her so strangely, and what manner of man played upon it. Perhaps they were not men at all, her spinning head decided. Perhaps the angels she’d been gabbing about minutes before had come to earth, and these blasts were their proclamations.
She started out into the snow, suddenly and uncontrollably certain that this was true. Their heavenly guardians had come to save them, and Mama too, more than likely. If she looked hard she would see them soon, gold and blue and purple. She stood up on the seat, clinging to the canvas, to get a better view, scanning the blank snow in every direction. Her study was rewarded. Just as the trumpets began their third hallelujah, the snow parted for a few moments. She saw the mountains rising to left and right like the teeth of a trap, and ahead of her a single titanic peak, its lower slopes forested. The perimeter of the trees lay no more than a hundred yards from the wagon, and the music she heard was coming from that direction, she was certain of it. Of her father, and of the men accompanying him, there was no sign, but they had surely disappeared among the trees. It would be quite safe to follow them, and wonderful to be there at her father’s side when he was reunited with Mama. Wouldn’t that be a blissful time, kissing her mother in a circle of angels, while Whitney and all the men who had scorned her father looked on agog?
The opening in the veil of snow was closing again, but before it did so she jumped down from the wagon and started off in the direction of the trees. Within moments, snow had obliterated the wagons behind her, just as it had covered the forest ahead, and she was following her nose through a blank world, stumbling with every other step. The drifts lay perilously deep in places, and several times she dropped into drifts so deep she was almost buried alive. But just as her frozen limbs threatened to give up on her, the trumpets came again, and the music put life back into her sinews and filled her head with bliss. There was a piece of paradise up ahead. Angels and Mama and her loving father, with whom she would build a city that would be the wonder of the world.
She would not die, of that she was certain. Not today, not for many years to come. She had great work to do, and the angels would not see her perish in the snow, knowing how far she had traveled to perform that labor.
And now she saw the trees, pines higher than any house, like a wall of sentinels in front of her. Calling for her father she ran toward them, careless of the cold and the bruises and her spinning head. The trumpets were close, and there were bursts of color in the corner of her eye, as though some of the angelic throng, who had not yet picked their instruments, were clustered about her, the tips of their beating wings all that she was allowed to glimpse.
Borne by invisible hands, she was ushered beneath the canopy of trees and there, where the snow could
not come, and the ground was soft with pine needles, she sank down onto her knees and drew a dozen heaving breaths while the sound of trumpets touched her in every part.
From Sacrament
The braids of light in which the Nilotic had been wed to itself were dispersing now, and as they did so the creature turned and looked at Will. Simeon had not done too badly with the portrait he’d painted, Will thought. He’d caught the grace of the creature well enough. What he’d failed to capture was the alien cadences of its proportions; its subtle otherness, which made Will a little fearful it would do him harm.
But when it spoke, his fears fled.
“We have come such a distance together,” it said, its voice mellifluous. “What will you do now?”
“I want to go a little further,” Will replied, glancing back over his shoulder.
“I’m sure you do,” the Nilotic said. “But believe me when I tell you it wouldn’t be wise. Every step we take we go deeper into the living heart of the world. It will take you from yourself, and at last, you will be lost.”
“I don’t care.”
“But those who love you will care. They’ll mourn you, more than you know. I would not wish to be responsible for another moment’s suffering.”