by Clive Barker
“I just want to see a little more,” Will said.
“How much is a little?”
“I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Will said. “I’ll walk with you for a while, and we’ll turn back when you tell me it’s time.”
“I won’t be coming back,” the Nilotic said. “I intend to unmake the House, and must unmake it from its heart.”
“Then where will you go?”
“Away. From men and women.”
“Is there anywhere like that left?”
“You’d be surprised,” the Nilotic said, and so saying, moved past Will and proceeded on into the mystery.
It had not explicitly forbidden Will to follow it, which was all the invitation he needed. He went in cautious pursuit of it, like a spawning fish climbing waters that would have dashed him to death without the Nilotic ahead of him to breast the flow. Even so, he quickly understood the truth in its warnings. The deeper they ventured the more it seemed he was treading not among the echoes of the world, but the world itself, his soul a thread of bliss passing into its mysteries.
He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bowerbird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was; and was; and was; and that was the joy of it.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps among the clouds, perhaps among the fish, he lost sight of his guide. The creature that had been, in its human incarnations, both his maker and his tormentor, slipped away and was gone out of his life forever. He was vaguely aware of its departure, and knew its going to be a signal that he should stop and turn round. It had trusted him with his destiny; it was his responsibility not to abuse the gift. Not for his sake, but for those who would mourn him if he was lost to them.
He shaped all these thoughts quite clearly. But he was too besotted to act upon them. How could he turn his back on these glories, with so much more to see?
On he went then, where only souls who had learned the homeward paths by heart dared to go.
THREE
VISIONS AND DREAMS
I often use dreams in stories as stepping-stones. They’re a way to unknit the character’s certainty in the here and now and begin the process of transferring him to a new place. Or perhaps reminding him of something very old.
In the passage I’ve selected from Weaveworld, for instance, Cal Mooney has forgotten his visit into a miraculous country, but is reminded of it when he eats a dried-up Giddy Fruit, picked from an orchard in that country. The fruit induces a waking vision, and he sets off in pursuit of what he’s witnessed. An even more expansive vision seizes Maddox Barbarossa in the passage from Galilee. Trapped in the Sky Room of his mother’s house, he is granted a glimpse of her legendary origins. It transforms him. Though he enters a room a cripple, the vision heals him; and incites him to begin work on the story that is the matter of the book.
There is another order of experience among these pieces, however: one which hovers on the borderline between the real and the imagined. In a sequence from Imajica, the aggressively heterosexual John Furie Zacharias, known as Gentle, is visited by a creature called Pie ‘oh’ pah. Pie is a mystif, a species able to project the mirror image of their partners’ profoundest erotic desires. Gentle makes love to what he imagines is his ex-lover, Judith. Then he discovers the truth; or perhaps another version of it.
Here the dream state bleeds into reality, and it’s no longer possible readily to say what is true and what’s not.
In some ways the material in this chapter suggests that that issue can never be truly resolved, nor perhaps needs to be. We’re like Peer Gynt, in Ibsen’s play, going through life peeling away its layers like the skin of some infinite onion, one vision supplanted by another, and each—for a little while, at least—looking like reality.
From Weaveworld
The Mersey was high tonight, and fast; its waters a filthy brown, its spume gray. Cal leaned on the promenade railing and stared across the churning river to the deserted shipyards on the far bank. Once this waterway had been busy with ships, arriving weighed down with their cargo and riding high as they headed for faraway. Now, it was empty. The docks silted up, the wharves and warehouses idle. Spook City; fit only for ghosts.
He felt like one himself. An insubstantial wanderer. And cold too, the way the dead must be cold. He put his hands in his jacket pocket to warm them, and his fingers found there half a dozen soft objects, which he took out and examined by the light of a nearby lamp.
They looked like withered plums, except that the skin was much tougher, like old shoe leather. Clearly they were fruit, but no variety he could name. Where and how had he come by them? He sniffed at one. It smelled slightly fermented, like a heady wine. And appetizing; tempting even. Its scent reminded him that he’d not eaten since lunchtime.
He put the fruit to his lips, his teeth breaking through the corrugated skin with ease. The scent had not deceived; the meat inside did indeed have an alcoholic flavor, the juice burning his throat like cognac. He chewed, and had the fruit to his lips for a second bite before he’d swallowed the first, finishing it off, seeds and all, with a fierce appetite.
Immediately, he began to devour another of them. He was suddenly ravenous. He lingered beneath the wind-buffeted lamp, the pool of light he stood in dancing, and fed his face as though he’d not eaten in a week.
He was biting into the penultimate fruit when it dawned on him that the rocking of the lamp above couldn’t entirely account for the motion of the light around him. He looked down at the fruit in his hand, but he couldn’t quite focus on it. God alive! Had he poisoned himself? The remaining fruit dropped from his hand and he was about to put his fingers down his throat to make himself vomit up the rest when the most extraordinary sensation overtook him.
He rose up; or at least some part of him did.
His feet were still on the concrete, he could feel it solid beneath his soles, but he was still floating up, the lamp shining beneath him now, the promenade stretching out to right and left of him, the river surging against the banks, wild and dark.
The rational fool in him said: you’re intoxicated; the fruits have made you drunk.
But he felt neither sick nor out of control; his sight (sights) were clear. He could still see from the eyes in his head, but also from a vantage point high above him. Nor was that all he could see. Part of him was with the litter too, gusting along the promenade; another part was out in the Mersey, gazing back toward the bank.
This proliferation of viewpoints didn’t confuse him: the sights mingled and married in his head, a pattern of risings and fallings; of looking out and back and far and near.
He was not one but many.
He Cal; he his father’s son; he his mother’s son; he a child buried in a man, and a man dreaming of being a bird.
A bird!
And all at once it all came back to him; all the wonders he’d forgotten surged back with exquisite particularity. A thousand moments and glimpses and words.
A bird, a chase, a house, a yard, a carpet, a flight (and he the bird; yes! yes!); then enemies and friends; Shadwell, Immacolata; the monsters; and Suzanna, his beautiful Suzanna, her place suddenly clear in the story his mind was telling itself.
He remembered it all. The carpet unweaving, the house coming apart; then into the Fugue, and the glories that the night there had brought.
It took all his newfound senses to hold the memories, but he was not overwhelmed. It seemed he dreamed them all at once; held them in a moment that was sweet beyond words: a reunion of se
lf and secret self which was an heroic remembering.
And after the recognition, tears, as for the first time he touched the buried grief he felt at losing the man who’d taught him the poem he’d recited in Los orchard: his father, who’d lived and died and never once known what Cal knew now.
Momentarily, sorrow and salt drew him back into himself, and he was single-sighted once more, standing under the uncertain light, bereft-
Then his soul soared again, higher now, and higher, and this time it reached escape velocity.
Suddenly he was up, up above England.
Below him moonlight fell on bright continents of cloud, whose vast shadows moved over hillside and suburb like silent ushers of sleep. He went too, carried on the same winds. Over tracts of land which pylons strode in humming lines; and city streets the hour had emptied of all but felons and wild dogs.
And this flight, gazing down like a lazy hawk, stars at his back, the isle beneath him, this flight was companion to that other he’d taken, over the carpet, over the Fugue.
No sooner had his mind turned to the Weaveworld than he seemed to sniff it—seemed to know where it lay beneath him. His eye was not sharp enough to pick out its place, but he knew he could find it, if he could only keep this new sense intact when he finally returned to the body beneath him.
The carpet was north-northeast of the city, that he was certain of; many miles away and still moving. Was it in Suzanna’s hands? Was she fleeing to some remote place where she prayed their enemies wouldn’t come? No, the news was worse than that, he sensed. The Weaveworld and the woman who carried it were in terrible jeopardy, somewhere below him—
At that thought his body grew possessive of him once more. He felt it around him—its heat, its weight—and he exalted in its solidity. Flying thoughts were all very well, but what were they worth without muscle and bone to act upon them?
A moment later he was standing beneath the light once more, and the river was still churning and the clouds he’d just seen from above moved in mute flotillas before a wind that smelled of the sea. The salt he tasted was not sea salt; it was the tears he’d shed for the death of his father, and for his forgetting, and for his mother too perhaps—for it seemed all loss was one loss, all forgetting one forgetting.
But he’d brought new wisdom from the high places. He knew now that things forgotten might be recalled; things lost, found again.
That was all that mattered in the world: to search and find.
He looked north-northeast. Though the many sights he’d had were once more narrowed to one, he knew he could still find the carpet.
He saw it with his heart. And seeing it, started in pursuit.
From Galilee
Nothing happened. I lay there, my breaths quick and shallow, my stomach ready to revolt, my body sticky with sweat, and the room just waited. The unfixable forms all around me—which had by now entirely blotted out every detail of windows and walls, even carpeted the floor—were almost still, their evolutionary endeavors at an end, at least for the moment.
Had the fact that I’d been injured shocked the presence, or presences, here into reticence, I wondered? Perhaps they felt they’d overstepped the bounds of enthusiasm, and now wanted nothing more than for me to crawl away and tend my wounds? Were they waiting for me to call down to Luman, perhaps? I thought about doing so, but decided against it. This was not a room in which to speak a simple word unless it was strictly necessary. I would be better lying still and quiet, I decided, and let my panicked body calm itself. Then, once I had governed myself, I would try to crawl back to the door. Sooner or later, Luman would come up and fetch me; I felt certain of that. Even if I had to wait all night.
Meanwhile I closed my eyes so as to put the images around me out of the way. Though the pain in my side was by now only a dull throb, my head and eyes were throbbing too; indeed it was not hard to imagine my body had become one fat heart, lying discarded on the floor, pumping its last.
I’m not afraid, I’d boasted, moments before the bolt had struck me. But now? Oh, I was very much afraid now. Afraid that I would die here, before I’d worked my way through the catalogue of unfinished business that sat at the back of my skull, awaiting my attention and of course never getting it, while all the time growing and growing. Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I’d done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.
And then, on the back of my neck, a touch; or what I believed to be a touch.
“Luman?” I murmured, and opened my eyes.
It wasn’t Luman; it wasn’t even a human touch, or anything resembling a human touch. It was some presence in the shadows; or the shadows themselves. They had swarmed upon me while my eyes were closed, and were now pressing close, their intimacy in no way threatening, but curiously tender. It was as though these roiling, senseless forms were concerned for my well-being, the way they brushed my nape, my brow, my lips. I staved absolutely still, holding my breath, half expecting their mood to change and their consolations to turn into something crueler. But no; they simply waited, close upon me.
Relieved, I drew breath. And in the instant of drawing, knew I had again unwittingly done something of consequence.
On the intake I felt the marked air about my head rush toward my open lips, and down my throat. I had no choice but to let it in. By the time I knew what was happening it was too late to resist. I was a vessel being filled. I could feel the marks on my tongue, against my tonsils, in my windpipe —
Nor did I want to choke them off, once I felt them inside me. At their entrance the pain in my side seemed instantly to recede, as did the throbbing in my head and eyes. The fear of a lonely demise here went out of my head and I was removed—in one breath—from despair to pleasurable ease.
What a maze of manipulations this chamber contained! First banality, then a blow, then this opiated bliss. I would be foolish, I knew, to believe that it did not have more tricks in its repertoire. But while it was content to give me some relief from my pains I was happy to take what was offered. Greedy for it, indeed. I gulped at the air, drawing in great draughts of it. And with every breath I felt further removed from my pain. Nor was it just the hurt in my flank and the throb in my head that was becoming remote; there was a much older ache—a dull, wretched pain that haunted the dead terrain of my lower limbs—that was now, for the first time in almost two human spans, relieved. It wasn’t, I think, that the pain was taken away; only that I no longer knew it as pain. Need I say I gladly banished it from my mind, sobbing gratitude to be relieved of an agony that had attended me so closely I’d forgotten how profound a hurt it was?
And with its passing my eyes—which were more acute than I could ever remember their being, even in my youth—found a new sight to astonish them. The air that I was expelling from my lungs had a bright solidity of its own; it came from me filled with flecks of delicate brilliance, as though a fire was stoked in me, and I was breathing out shards of flame. Was this some representation of my pain, I wondered? The room’s—or my own delirium’s—way of demonstrating the expulsion? That theory floated for ten seconds, then it was gone. The motes were about to show me their true nature, and it had nothing to do with pain.
They were still flowing from my mouth with every breath, but I wasn’t watching those I’d just exhaled. It was those that had flown from me first which drew my startled sight. They were seeding their luminescence in the shadows—disappeared into the cloudy bed around me. I watched with what I’d like to think was almost scientific detachment. There was a certain logic to all that happened to me here; or so I now supposed. The shadows were only half the equation: they were a site of possibilities, no more than that; the fertile mud of this chamber, waiting for some galvanizing spark to bring forth—to bring forth what?
That was the question. What did the marriage of fire and shadow want to show me?
The limits of the dome room had been banished. When the visions came—and oh, how they came!— they were vast.
First, out of the shadows, a landscape. The most primal of landscapes, in fact: rock and fire, and a flowing mass of magma. It was like the beginning of the world; red and black. It took me only a moment to make sense of this scene. The next, I was besieged with images, the scene before me transforming with every beat of my heart. Something flowered from the fire, gold and green, rising into a smoky sky. As it rose the blossoms it bore became fruit, and fell back onto the laval ground. I didn’t have time to watch them be consumed. A motion in the smoke off to my right drew my gaze. An animal of some kind—with pale, scarred flanks—galloped through my field of vision. I felt the violence of its hooves in my bowels. And before it had passed from sight came another, and another, then a herd of these beasts—not horses, but something close to them. Had I made these creatures? I wondered. Had I exhaled them with my pain; and the fire too, and the rock and tree that rose from the rock? Was all this my invention, or perhaps some remote memory, which the enchantments of the room had somehow made visible?
Even as I shaped that thought the pale herd changed direction and came pounding at me. I instinctively covered my head, to keep my brains from being beaten out. But for all the fury of their hooves, the passage of the herd did me no more harm than a light breeze; they passed over me, and away.
I looked up. In the few seconds I’d had my eyes averted the ground had given prodigious birth. There were now sights to be seen on every side. Close by me, sliding through the very air from which it was being carved, a snake came, bright as a flower. Before it was even finished with its own creation another creature snatched it up, and my eyes rose to find before me a form that was vaguely human, but winged and sleek. The snake was gone in an instant, swallowed down the throat of this thing, which then settled its fiery eyes on me as though wondering if I too were edible. Plainly I looked like poor fare. Pumping its massive wings the creature rose like a curtain to reveal another drama, stranger still, behind it.