The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  “I’m here,” he murmured.

  A fresh tide of light was rising through them both, the erotic becoming a visionary toil as he watched it sweep over their skin, its brightness intensifying with every thrust.

  Again she asked him, “Are you there?”

  How could she doubt it? He was never more present than in this act, never more comprehending of himself than when buried in the other sex.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Yet she asked again, and this time, though his mind was stewed in bliss, the tiny voice of reason murmured that it wasn’t his lady who was asking the question at all, but the woman on the telephone. He’d thrown the receiver off the hook, but she was haranguing the empty line, demanding he reply. Now he listened. There was no mistaking the voice. It was Jude. And if Jude was on the line, who the fuck was he fucking?

  Whoever it was, she knew the deception was over. She dug deeper into the flesh of his lower back and buttocks, raising her hips to press him deeper into her still, her sex tightening around his cock as though to prevent him from leaving her unspent. But he was sufficiently master of himself to resist and pulled out of her, his heart thumping like some crazy locked up in the cell of his chest.

  “Who the hell are you?” he yelled.

  Her hands were still upon him. Their heat and their demand, which had so aroused him moments before, unnerved him now. He threw her off and started to reach toward the lamp on the bedside table. She took hold of his erection as he did so and slid her palm along the shaft. Her touch was so persuasive he almost succumbed to the idea of entering her again, taking her anonymity as carte blanche and indulging in the darkness every last desire he could dredge up. She was putting her mouth where her hand had been, sucking him into her. He regained in two heartbeats the hardness he’d lost.

  Then the whine of the empty line reached his ears. Jude had given up trying to make contact. Perhaps she’d heard his panting and the promises he’d been making in the dark. The thought brought new rage. He took hold of the woman’s head and pulled her from his lap. What could have possessed him to want somebody he couldn’t even see? And what kind of whore offered herself that way? Diseased? Deformed? Psychotic? He had to see. However repulsive, he had to see!

  He reached for the lamp a second time, feeling the bed shake as the harridan prepared to make her escape. Fumbling for the switch, he brought the lamp off its perch. It didn’t smash, but its beams were cast up at the ceiling, throwing a gauzy light down on the room below. Suddenly fearful she’d attack him, he turned without picking the lamp up, only to find that the woman had already claimed her clothes from the snarl of sheets and was retreating to the bedroom door. His eyes had been feeding on darkness and projections for too long, and now, presented with solid reality, they were befuddled. Half concealed by shadow the woman was a mire of shifting forms—face blurred, body smeared, pulses of iridescence, slow now, passing from toes to head. The only fixable element in this flux was her eyes, which stared back at him mercilessly. He wiped his hand from brow to chin in the hope of sloughing the illusion off, and in these seconds she opened the door to make her escape. He leaped from the bed, still determined to get past his confusions to the grim truth he’d coupled with, but she was already halfway through the door, and the only way he could stop her was to seize hold of her arm.

  Whatever power had deranged his senses, its bluff was called when he made contact with her. The roiling forms of her face resolved themselves like pieces of a multifaceted jigsaw, turning and turning as they found their place, concealing countless other configurations—rare, wretched, bestial, dazzling—behind the shell of a congruous reality. He knew the features, now that they’d come to rest. Here were the ringlets, framing a face of exquisite symmetry. Here were the scars that healed with such unnatural speed. Here were the lips that hours before had described their owner as nothing and nobody. It was a lie! This nothing had two functions at least: assassin and whore. This nobody had a name.

  “Pie ‘oh’ pah!”

  Gentle let go of the man’s arm as though it were venomous. The form before him didn’t redissolve, however, for which fact Gentle was only half glad. That hallucinatory chaos had been distressing, but the solid thing it had concealed appalled him more. Whatever sexual imaginings he’d shaped in the darkness—Judith’s face, Judith’s breasts, belly, sex—all of them had been an illusion. The creature he’d coupled with, almost shot his load into, didn’t even share her sex.

  He was neither a hypocrite nor a puritan. He loved sex too much to condemn any expression of lust, and though he’d discouraged the homosexual courtships he’d attracted, it was out of indifference, not revulsion. So the shock he felt now was fueled more by the power of the deceit worked upon him than by the sex of the deceiver.

  “What have you done to me?” was all he could say. “What have you done?”

  Pie ‘oh’ pah stood his ground, knowing perhaps that his nakedness was his best defense.

  “I wanted to heal you,” he said. Though it trembled, there was music in his voice.

  “You put some drug in me.”

  “No!” Pie said.

  “Don’t give me no! I thought you were Judith! You let me think you were Judith!” He looked down at his hands, then up at the hard, lean body in front of him. “I felt her, not you.”

  Again, the same complaint. “What have you done to me?”

  “I gave you what you wanted,” Pie said.

  Gentle had no retort to this. In its way, it was the truth. Scowling, he sniffed his palms, thinking there might be traces of some drug in his sweat. But there was only the stench of sex on him, of the heat of the bed behind him.

  “You’ll sleep it off,” Pie said

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Gentle replied. “And if you go anywhere near Jude again, I swear … I swear … I’ll take you apart.”

  “You’re obsessed with her, aren’t you?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “It’ll do you harm.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It will, I’m telling you.”

  “I told you,” Gentle yelled, “shut the fuck up!”

  “She doesn’t belong to you,” came the reply.

  The words ignited new fury in Gentle. He reached for Pie and took him by the throat. The bundle of clothes dropped from the assassin’s arm, leaving him naked. But he put up no defense; he simply raised his hands and laid them lightly on Gentle’s shoulders. The gesture only infuriated Gentle further. He let out a stream of invective, but the placid face before him took both spittle and spleen without flinching. Gentle shook him, digging his thumbs into the man’s throat to stop his windpipe. Still he neither resisted nor succumbed, but stood in front of his attacker like a saint awaiting martyrdom.

  Finally, breathless with rage and exertion, Gentle let go his hold and threw Pie back, stepping away from the creature with a glimmer of superstition in his eyes. Why hadn’t the fellow fought back or fallen? Anything but this sickening passivity.

  “Get out,” Gentle told him.

  Pie still stood his ground, watching him with forgiving eyes.

  “Will you get out?” Gentle said again, more softly, and this time the martyr replied.

  “If you wish.”

  “I wish.”

  He watched Pie ‘oh’ pah stoop to pick up the scattered clothes. Tomorrow, this would all come clear in his head, he thought. He’d have shat this delirium out of his system, and these events—Jude, the chase, his near rape at the hands of the assassin—would be a tale to tell Klein and Clem and Taylor when he got back to London. They’d be entertained. Aware now that he was more naked than the other man, he turned to the bed and dragged a sheet off it to cover himself with.

  There was a strange moment then, when he knew the bastard was still in the room, still watching him, and all he could do was wait for him to leave. Strange because it reminded him of other bedroom partings: sheets tangled, sweat cooling, confusion and self-repro
ach keeping glances at bay. He waited, and waited, and finally heard the door close. Even then he didn’t turn, but listened to the room to be certain there was only one breath in it: his own. When he finally looked back and saw that Pie ‘oh’ pah had gone, he pulled the sheet up around himself like a toga, concealing himself from the absence in the room, which stared back at him too much like a reflection for his peace of mind. Then he locked the suite door and stumbled back to bed, listening to his drugged head whine like the empty telephone line.

  FOUR

  LIVES

  Every story concerns itself with lives, of course: so why try to gather pieces together under this heading? Because there is a certain magic in the ways that words can summarize the arc of life, lingering for a sentence or two to offer some piece of a character’s history, then moving on, skipping years perhaps, until another significant event is alighted upon. This is very much the case in the story of Zelim, excerpted here from Galilee. In one sense, the tale is a self-contained element in the novel. Though Zelim appears as a ghost in latter portions of the book it isn’t strictly necessary to tell his life-story. But Galilee has a strange, digressionary structure, and Zelim’s story a peculiar poignancy which reflects on the lives of characters he never even meets.

  There is a far less wholesome life documented in “The Last European,” from The Damnation Game. Anthony Breer, the Razor-Eater, is discovered in what he intends to be his last minutes on earth. His attempt at suicide is halted by the intervention of one Mamoulian, the self-styled Last European. In the few pages of this excerpt we get a snapshot, as it were, of a life lived in the shadow of its own corruption.

  Also collected here is a short story called “The Departed,” which is one of the very few short stories I have written on commission. I was invited to create the story for the op-ed page of the New York Times, on Halloween. It’s a ghost story, of sorts. In their wisdom, the editors retitled the story “Hermione and the Moon,” apparently finding my original title, restored here, too “dark.” The story is in fact quite optimistic, in a bittersweet way, and at its heart is a philosophical nugget which I was delighted to be able to slip into the minds of Times readers while they drank their morning coffee.

  From Galilee

  Let me tell you what happened to Zelim after he left Aha. Determined to prove—if only to himself—that the forest from which the family had emerged was not a place to be afraid of, he made his departure through the trees. It was damp and cold, and more than once he contemplated retreating to the brightness of the shore, but after a time such thoughts, along with his fear, dissipated. There was nothing here that was going to do harm to his soul. When shit fell on or about him, as now and then it did, the shitter wasn’t some child-devouring beast as he’d been brought up to believe it’d be, just a bird. When something moved in the thicket, and he caught the gleam of an eye, it was not the gaze of a nomadic djinn that fell on him, but that of a boar or a wild dog.

  His caution evaporated along with his fear, and much to his surprise his spirits grew lighter. He began to sing to himself as he went. Not the songs the fishermen sang when they were out together, which were invariably mournful or obscene, but the two or three little songs he remembered from his childhood. Simple ditties which brought back happy memories.

  For food, he ate berries, washed down with water from the streams that wound between the trees. Twice he came upon nests in the undergrowth and was able to dine on raw eggs. Only at night, when he was obliged to rest (once the sun went down he had no way of knowing the direction in which he was traveling), did he become at all anxious. He had no means to light a fire, so he was obliged to sit in the darkened thicket until dawn, praying a bear or a pack of wolves didn’t come sniffing for a meal.

  It took him four days and nights to get to the other side of the forest. By the time he emerged from the trees he’d become so used to the gloom that the bright sun made his head ache. He laid down in the grass at the fringe of the trees, and dozed there in the warmth, thinking he’d set off again when the sun was a little less bright. In fact, he slept until twilight, when he was awoken by the sound of voices rising and falling in prayer. He sat up. A little distance from where he’d laid his head there was a ridge of rocks, like the spine of some dead giant, and on the narrow trail that wound between these boulders was a small group of holy men, singing their prayers as they walked. Some were carrying lamps, by which light he saw their faces: ragged beards, deeply furrowed brows, sunbaked pates; these were men who’d suffered for their faith, he thought.

  He got up and limped in their direction, calling to them as he approached so that they wouldn’t be startled by his sudden appearance. Seeing him, the men came to a halt; a few suspicious glances were exchanged.

  “I’m lost and hungry,” Zelim said to them. “I wonder if you have some bread, or if you can at least tell me where I can find a bed for the night.”

  The leader, who was a burly man, passed his lamp to his companion, and beckoned Zelim.

  “What are you doing out here?” the monk asked.

  “I came through the forest,” Zelim explained.

  “Don’t you know this is a bad road?” the monk said. His breath was the foulest thing Zelim had ever smelled. “There are robbers on this road,” the monk went on. “Many people have been beaten and murdered here.” Suddenly, the monk reached out and caught hold of Zelim’s arm, pulling him close. At the same time he pulled out a large knife, and put it to Zelim’s throat. “Call them!” the monk said.

  Zelim didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Call who?”

  “The rest of your gang! You tell them I’ll slit your throat if they make a move on us.”

  “No, you’ve got me wrong. I’m not a bandit.”

  “Shut up!” the monk said, pressing his blade into Zelim’s flesh so deeply that blood began to run. “Call to them!”

  “I’m on my own,” Zelim protested. “I swear! I swear on my mother’s eyes, I’m not a bandit.”

  “Slit his throat, Nazar,” said one of the monks.

  “Please, don’t do that,” Zelim begged. “I’m an innocent man.” “There are no innocent men left,” Nazar, the man who held him, said. “These are the last days of the world, and everyone left alive is corrupt.”

  Zelim assumed this was high-flown philosophy, such as only a monk might understand. “If you say so,” he replied. “What do I know? But I tell you I’m not a bandit. I’m a fisherman.”

  “You’re a very long way from the sea,” said the ratty little monk to whom Nazar had passed his lamp. He leaned in to peer at Zelim, raising the light a little as he did so. “Why’d you leave the fish behind?”

  “Nobody liked me,” Zelim replied. It seemed best to be honest.

  “And why was that?”

  Zelim shrugged. Not too honest, he thought. “They just didn’t,” he said.

  The man studied Zelim a little longer, then he said to the leader: “You know, Nazar, I think he’s telling the truth.” Zelim felt the blade at his neck dig a little less deeply into his flesh. “We thought you were one of the bandits’ boys,” the monk explained to him, “left in our path to distract us.”

  Once again. Zelim felt he was not entirely understanding what he was being told. “So … while you’re talking to me, the bandits come?”

  “Not talking,” Nazar said. His knife slid down from Zelim’s neck to the middle of his chest; there it cut at Zelim’s already ragged shirt. The monk’s other hand slid through the shirt, while the knife continued on its southward journey, until it was pressed against the front of Zelim’s breeches.

  “He’s a little old for me, Nazar,” the monk’s companion commented, and turning his back on Zelim sat down among the rocks.

  “Am I on my own then?” Nazar wanted to know.

  By way of answering him, three of the men closed on Zelim like hungry dogs. He was wrested to the ground, where his clothes were pulled seam from seam, and the monks proceeded to molest him, ignoring hi
s shouts of protest, or his pleas to be left alone. They made him lick their feet and their fundaments, and suck their beards and nipples and purple-headed cocks. They held him down while one by one they took him, not caring that he bled and bled.

  While this was going on the other monks, who’d retired to the rocks, read, or drank wine or lay on their backs watching the stars. One was even praying. All this Zelim could see because he deliberately looked away from his violators, determined not to let them see the terror in his eyes, and equally determined not to weep. So instead he watched the others, and waited for the men who were violating him to be finished.

  He fully expected to be murdered when they were done with him, but this, at least, he was spared. Instead the monks had the night with him, on and off, using him every way their desires could devise, and then, just before dawn, they left him there among the rocks, and went on their way.

  The sun came up, but Zelim closed his eyes against it. He didn’t want to look at the light ever again. He was too ashamed. But by midday the heat made him get to his knees and drag himself into the comparative cool of the rocks. There, to his surprise, he found that one of the holy men—perhaps the one who had been praying—had left a skin of wine, some bread, and a piece of dried fruit. It was no accident, he knew. The man had left it for Zelim.

  Now, and only now, did the fisherman allow the tears to come, moved not so much by his own agonies, but by the fact that there had been one who’d cared enough for him to do him this kindness.

  He drank and ate. Maybe it was the potency of the wine, but he felt remarkably renewed, and covering his nakedness as best he could, he got up from his niche among the rocks and set off down the trail. His body still ached, but the bleeding had stopped, and rather than lie down when night fell he walked under the stars. Somewhere along the way a bony-flanked she-dog came creeping after him, looking perhaps for the comfort of human company. He didn’t shoo her away; he too wanted company. After a time the animal became brave enough to walk at Zelim’s heel, and finding that her new master didn’t kick her, was soon trotting along as though they’d been together since birth.