The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  He let his feelings go to Pie, if there was indeed a going, which he doubted. Space, like time, belonged to the other tale—to the tragedy of separation they’d left behind. Stripped of his senses and their necessities, almost unborn again, he knew the mystifs comfort as it knew his, and that dissolution he’d woken in terror of so many times stood revealed as the beginning of bliss.

  A gust of wind, blowing between the rocks, caught the embers at their side, and their glow became a momentary flame. It brightened the face in front of him, and the sight summoned him back from his unborn state. It was no great hardship to return. The place they’d found together was out of time and could not decay, and the face in front of him, for all its frailty (or perhaps because of it), was beautiful to look at. Pie smiled at him but said nothing.

  “We should sleep,” Gentle said. “We’ve got a long way to go tomorrow.”

  Another gust came along, and there were flecks of snow in it, stinging Gentle’s face. He pulled the hood of his coat up over his head and got up to check on the welfare of the doeki. It had made a shallow bed for itself in the snow and was asleep. By the time he got back to the fire, which had found some combustible morsel and was devouring it brightly, the mystif was also asleep, its hood pulled up around its head. As he stared down at the visible crescent of Pie’s face, a simple thought came: that though the wind was moaning at the rock, ready to bury them, and there was death in the valley behind and a city of atrocities ahead, he was happy. He lay down on the hard ground beside the mystif. His last thought as sleep came was of Taylor, lying on a pillow which was becoming a snowfield as he drew his final breaths, his face growing translucent and finally disappearing, so that when Gentle slipped from consciousness, it was not into darkness but into the whiteness of that deathbed, turned to untrodden snow.

  The marriage of the Eurhetemec mystif and the fugitive John Furie Zacharias, called Gentle, took place that night in the depths of the asylum. Happily, their priest was passing through a period of lucidity and was willing to be addressed by his real name. Father Athanasius. He bore the evidence of his dementia, however: scars on his forehead, where the crowns of thorns he repeatedly fashioned and wore had dug deep, and scabs on his hands where he’d driven nails into his flesh. He was as fond of the frown as Scopique of the grin, though the look of a philosopher sat badly on a face better suited to a comedian: with its blob nose that perpetually ran, its teeth too widely spread, and eyebrows, like hairy caterpillars, that concertinaed when he furrowed his forehead. He was kept, along with twenty or so other prisoners judged exceptionally seditious, in the deepest part of the asylum, his windowless cell guarded more vigorously than those of the prisoners on higher floors. It had thus taken some fancy maneuvering on Scopique’s part to get access to him, and the bribed guard, an Oethac, was only willing to turn a hooded eye for a few minutes. The ceremony was therefore short, conducted in an ad hoc mixture of Latin and English, with a few phrases pronounced in the language of Athanasius’s Second Dominion order, the Dearthers, the music of which more than compensated for its unintelligibility. The oaths themselves were necessarily spare, given the constraints of time and the redundancy of most of the conventional vocabulary.

  “This isn’t done in the sight of Hapexamendios,” Athanasius said, “nor in the sight of any God, or the agent of any God. We pray that the presence of our Lady may however touch this union with Her infinite compassion, and that you go together into the great union at some higher time. Until then, I can only be as a glass held up to your sacrament, which is performed in your sight for your sake.”

  The full significance of these words didn’t strike Gentle until later, when, with the oaths made and the ceremony done, he lay down in his cell beside his partner.

  “I always said I’d never marry,” he whispered to the mystif.

  “Regretting it already?”

  “Not at all. But it’s strange to be married and not have a wife.”

  “You can call me wife. You can call me whatever you want. Reinvent me. That’s what I’m for.”

  “I didn’t marry you to use you, Pie.”

  “That’s part of it, though. We must be functions of each other. Mirrors, maybe.” It touched Gentle’s face. “I’ll use you, believe me.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. Comfort, argument, pleasure.”

  “I do want to learn from you.”

  “About what?”

  “How to fly out of my head again, the way I did this afternoon. How to travel by mind.”

  “By mote,” Pie said, echoing the way Gentle had felt as he’d driven his thoughts through N’ashap’s skull. “Meaning: a particle of thought, as seen in sunlight.”

  “It can only be done in sunlight?”

  “No. It’s just easier that way. Almost everything’s easier in sunlight.”

  “Except this,” Gentle said, kissing the mystif. “I’ve always preferred the night for this …”

  He had come to their marriage bed determined that he would make love with the mystif as it truly was, allowing no fantasy to intrude between his senses and the vision he’d glimpsed in N’ashap’s office. That oath made him as nervous as a virgin groom, demanding as it did a double unveiling. Just as he unbuttoned and discarded the clothes that concealed the mystif’s essential sex, so he had to tear from his eyes the comfort of the illusions that lay between his sight and its object. What would he feel then? It was easy to be aroused by a creature so totally reconfigured by desire that it was indistinguishable from the thing desired. But what of the configurer itself, seen naked by naked eyes?

  In the shadows its body was almost feminine, its planes serene, its surface smooth, but there was an austerity in its sinew he couldn’t pretend was womanly; nor were its buttocks lush, or its chest ripe. It was not his wife, and though it was happy to be imagined that way, and his mind teetered over and over on the edge of giving in to such invention, he resisted, demanding his eyes hold to their focus and his fingers to the facts. He began to wish it were lighter in the cell, so as not to give ease to ambiguity. When he put his hand into the shadow between its legs and felt the heat and motion there, he said, “I want to see,” and Pie dutifully stood up in the light from the window so that Gentle could have a plainer view. His heart was pumping furiously, but none of the blood was reaching his groin. It was filling his head, making his face burn. He was glad he sat in shadow, where his discomfort was less visible, though he knew that shadow concealed only the outward show, and the mystif was perfectly aware of the fear he felt. He took a deep breath and got up from the bed, crossing to within touching distance of this enigma.

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Pie asked softly. “Why not let the dreams come?”

  “Because I don’t want to dream you,” he said. “I came on this journey to understand. How can I understand anything if all I look at is illusions?”

  “Maybe that’s all there is.”

  “That isn’t true,” he said simply.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Pie said, temptingly. “Look plainly tomorrow. Just enjoy yourself tonight. I’m not the reason we’re in the Imajica. I’m not the puzzle you came to solve.”

  “On the contrary,” Gentle said, a smile creeping into his voice. “I think maybe you are the reason. And the puzzle. I think if we stayed here, locked up together, we could heal the Imajica from what’s between us.” The smile appeared on his face now. “I never realized that till now. That’s why I want to see you clearly. Pie, so there’re no lies between us.” He put his hand against the mystif’s sex. “You could fuck or be fucked with this, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you could give birth?”

  “I haven’t. But it’s been known.”

  “And fertilize?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s wonderful. And is there something else you can do?”

  “Like what?”

  “It isn’t all doer or done to, is it? I know it isn’t. There’s som
ething else.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “A third way.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it with me, then.”

  “I can’t. You’re male, Gentle. You’re a fixed sex. It’s a physical fact.” The mystif put its hand on Gentle’s prick, still soft in his trousers. “I can’t take this away. You wouldn’t want me to.” It frowned. “Would you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “If it meant finding a way, maybe I do. I’ve used my dick every way I know how. Maybe it’s redundant.”

  Now it was Pie’s turn to smile, but such a fragile smile, as though the unease Gentle had felt now burdened the mystif instead. It narrowed its shining eyes.

  “What are you thinking?” Gentle said.

  “How you make me a little afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the pain ahead. Of losing you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me,” Gentle said, putting his hand around the back of Pie’s neck and stroking the nape with his thumb. “I told you, we could heal the Imajica from here. We’re strong, Pie.”

  The anxiety didn’t go from the mystif’s face, so Gentle coaxed its face toward his and kissed it, first discreetly, then with an ardor it seemed reluctant to match. Only moments before, sitting on the bed, he’d been the tentative one. Now it was the other way around. He put his hand down to its groin, hoping to distract it from its sadness with caresses. The flesh came to meet his fingers, warm and fluted, trickling into the shallow cup of his palm a moisture his skin drank like liquor. He pressed deeper, feeling the elaboration grow at his touch. There was no hesitation here; no shame or sorrow in this flesh, to keep it from displaying its need, and need had never failed to arouse him. Seeing it on a woman’s face was a sure aphrodisiac, and it was no less so now.

  He reached up from this play to his belt, unbuckling it with one hand. But before he could take hold of his prick, which was becoming painfully hard, the mystif did so, guiding him inside it with an urgency its face still failed to betray. The bath of its sex soothed his ache, immersing him balls and all. He let out a long sigh of pleasure, his nerve endings—starved of this sensation for months—rioting. The mystif had closed its eyes, its mouth open. He put his tongue hard between its lips, and it responded with a passion he had never seen it manifest before. Its hands wrapped around his shoulders, and in possession of them both it fell back against the wall, so hard the breath went from it into Gentle’s throat. He drew it down into his lungs, inciting a hunger for more, which the mystif understood without need of words, inhaling from the heated air between them and filling Gentle’s chest as though he were a just-drowned man being pumped back to life. He answered its gift with thrusts, its fluids running freely down the inside of his thighs. It gave him another breath, and another. He drank them all, eating the pleasure off its face in the moments between, the breath received as his prick was given. In this exchange they were both entered and enterer: a hint, perhaps, of the third way Pie had spoken of, the coupling between unfixed forces that could not occur until his manhood had been taken from him. Now, as he worked his prick against the warmth of the mystif’s sex, the thought of relinquishing it in pursuit of another sensation seemed ludicrous. There could be nothing better than this; only different.

  He closed his eyes, no longer afraid that his imagination would put a memory, or some invented perfection, in Pie’s place, only that if he looked at the mystif’s bliss too much longer he’d lose all control. What his mind’s eye pictured, however, was more potent still: the image of them locked together as they were, inside each other, breath and prick swelling inside each other’s skins until they could swell no further. He wanted to warn the mystif that he could hold on no longer, but it seemed to have that news already. It grasped his hair, pulling him off its face, the sting of it just another spur now, and the sobs too, coming out of them both. He let his eyes open, wanting to see its face as he came, and in the time it took for his lashes to unknit, the beauty in front of him became a mirror. It was his face he was seeing, his body he was holding. The illusion didn’t cool him. Quite the reverse. Before the mirror softened into flesh, its glass becoming the sweat on Pie’s sweet face, he passed the point of no return, and it was with that image in his eye—his face mingled with the mystif’s—that his body unleashed its little torrent. It was as ever exquisite and racking, a short delirium followed by a sense of loss he’d never made peace with.

  The mystif began to laugh almost before he was finished, and when Gentle drew his first clear breath it was to ask, “What’s so funny?”

  “The silence,” Pie said, suppressing the music so that Gentle could share the joke.

  He’d lain here in this cell hour after hour, unable to make a moan, but he’d never heard a silence such as this. The whole asylum was listening, from the depths where Father Athanasius wove his piercing crowns to N’ashap’s office, its carpet indelibly marked with the blood his nose had shed. There was not a waking soul who’d not heard their coupling.

  “Such a silence,” the mystif said.

  As it spoke, the hush was broken by the sound of someone yelling in his cell, a rage of loss and loneliness that went on unchecked for the rest of the night, as if to cleanse the gray stone of the joy that had momentarily tainted it.

  From Sacrament

  He was standing in the crowded street in St. Petersburg; and if the cold had not already snatched his breath, the sight before him would have done so: Eropkin’s palace, its walls raised forty feet high, and glittering in the light of the torches and bonfires that were blazing on every side. They were warm, those fires, but the palace did not shed a drop of water, for their heat could not compete with the frigid air.

  He looked around at the throng who pressed at the barricades, daring the hussars who kept them in check with boots and threats. By Christ, how they stank tonight! Fetid clothes on fetid bodies.

  “Rabble …,” he murmured.

  To Steep’s left, a beet-faced brat was shrieking on her father’s shoulders, snot frozen at her nostrils. To his right a drunkard with a grease-clogged beard reeled about, with a woman in an even more incapacitated state clinging to his arm.

  “I hate these people,” said a voice close to his ear. “Let’s come back later when it’s quiet.”

  He looked around at the speaker, and there was Rosa, her exquisite face, pink from the cold, framed by her fur-lined hood. Oh but she was beautiful tonight, with the lantern flames flickering in her eyes.

  “Please, Jacob,” she said, tugging on his sleeve in that little-girl-lost fashion which she knew worked so well. “We could make a baby tonight, Jacob. Truly, I believe we could.” She was pressing close to him now, and he caught the scent of her breath; a fragrance no Parisian perfumerie could ever hope to capture. Even here, in the heart of an iron winter, she had the smell of spring about her. “Put your hand on my belly, Jacob,” she said, taking his hand in hers and placing it there. “Isn’t that warm?” It was. “Don’t you think we might make a life tonight?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “So let’s be away from these animals,” she said. “Please, Jacob. Please.”

  Oh, she could be persuasive when she was in this coquettish mood. And truth to tell he liked to play along.

  “Animals, you say?”

  “No better,” she replied, with a growl of contempt in her voice.

  “Would you have them dead?” he asked her.

  “Every one of them.”

  “Every one?”

  “But you and me. And from our love a new race of perfect people would come, to have the world the way God intended it.”

  Hearing this, he couldn’t refrain from kissing her, though the streets of St. Petersburg were not like those of Paris or London, and any display of affection, especially one as passionate as theirs, would be bound to draw censure. He didn’t care. She was his other, his complement, his completion. Without her, he w
as nothing. Taking her glorious face in his hands, he laid his lips on hers, her breath a fragrant phantom rising between their faces. The words that breath carried still astonished him, though he had heard them innumerable times.

  “I love you,” she told him. “And I will love you as long as I have life.”

  He kissed her again, harder, knowing there were envious eyes upon them, but caring not at all. Let the crowd stare and cluck and shake their heads. They would never feel in all their dreary lives what he and Rosa felt now: the supreme conjunction of soul and soul.

  And then, in the midst of the kiss, the din of the crowd receded and completely disappeared. He opened his eyes. They were no longer standing on the street-side of the barricades, but were at the very threshold of the palace. The thoroughfare behind them was deserted. Half the night had passed in the time it took to draw breath. It was now long after midnight.

  “Nobody’s going to spy on us?” Rosa was asking him.

  “I’ve paid all the guards to go and drink themselves stupid,” he told her. “We’ve got four hours before the morning crowd starts to come and gawp. We can do what we like in here.”

  She slipped the hood back off her head, and combed her hair out with her fingers so that it lay abundantly about her shoulders. “Is there a bedroom?” she said.

  He smiled. “Oh yes, there’s a bedroom. And a big four-poster bed, all carved out of ice.”

  “Take me to it,” she said, catching hold of his hand.

  Into the palace they ventured, through the receiving room, which was handsomely appointed with mantelpiece and furniture; through the vast ballroom with its glittering stalactite chandelier; through the dressing room, where there was arranged a wardrobe of coats and hats and shoes, all perfectly carved out of ice.

  “It’s uncanny,” Jacob said, glancing back toward the front door, “the way the light refracts.” Though they had ventured deep into the heart of the structure, the glow from the torches set all around the palace was still bright, flickering through the translucent walls. To other eyes it would surely have aroused only wonder; but Jacob was discomfited. Something about the place awoke in him a memory he couldn’t name.