The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  “Please come in,” he said, more quietly.

  Was it because he asked this time instead of demanded, that the legion obeyed? Or simply that they’d been mustering themselves, and were only now ready to come to his aid? Either way, they began to rattle the closed doors. The barman grunted and turned. Even to his bleary eyes it must have been perfectly apparent that it was no natural wind that was pushing to come in. It pressed too rhythmically; it beat its fist too heavily. And its howls, oh its howls were nothing like the howls of any storm he’d heard before. He turned back to Tommy-Ray.

  “What the fuck’s out there?” he said.

  Tommy-Ray just lay where he’d been thrown and smiled up at the man, that legendary smile, that forgive-me-my-trespasses smile, that would never be the same again now that he was the Death-Boy.

  Die, that smile now said, die while I watch you. Die slowly. Die quickly. I don’t care. It’s all the same to the Death-Boy.

  As the smile spread the doors opened, shards of the lock, and splinters of wood, thrown across the bar before the invading wind. Out in the sunlight the spirits in this storm had not been visible; but they made themselves so now, congealing their dust in front of the witnesses’ eyes. One of the men slumped on the table roused himself in time to see three figures forming from the head down in front of him, their torsos trailing like innards of dust. He backed off against the wall, where they threw themselves upon him. Tommy-Ray heard his screech but didn’t see what kind of death they gave him. His eyes were on the spirits that were coming at the bartender.

  Their faces were all appetite, he saw; as though traveling together in that caravan had given them time to simplify themselves. They were no longer as distinct from each other as they’d been; perhaps their dust had mingled in the storm, and each had become a little like the other. Unparticularized, they were more terrible than they’d been at the cemetery wall. He shuddered at the sight, the remnants of the man he’d been in fear of them, the Death-Boy in bliss. These were soldiers in his army: eyes vast, mouths vaster, dust and want in one howling legion.

  The bartender started to pray out loud, but he wasn’t putting his faith in prayer alone. He reached down to his side and picked Tommy-Ray up one-handed, hauling him close. Then, with his hostage taken, he opened the door to the sex arena and backed through it. Tommy-Ray heard him repeating something as they went, the hook of the prayer perhaps? Santo Dios! Santo Dios! But neither words nor hostage slowed the advance of the wind and its dusty freight. They came after him, throwing the door wide.

  Tommy-Ray saw their mouths grow huger still, and then the blur of faces was upon them both. He lost sight of what happened next. The dust filled his eyes before he had an opportunity to close them. But he felt the bartender’s grip slide from him, and the next moment a rush of wet heat. The howling in the wind instantly rose in volume to a keening that he tried to stop his ears against, but it came anyway, boring into the bone of his head like a hundred drills.

  When he opened his eyes he was red. Chest, arms, legs, hands: all red. The bartender, the source of the color, had been dragged onto the stage where the night before Tommy had seen the woman and the dog. His head was in one corner, upended; his arms, hands locked in supplication, in another; the rest of him lay center stage, the neck still pumping.

  Tommy-Ray tried not to be sickened (he was the Death-Boy, after all) but this was too much. And yet, he told himself, what had he expected when he’d invited them over the threshold? This was not a circus he had in tow. It was not sane; it was not civilized.

  Shaking, sickened and chastened, he got to his feet and hauled himself back out into the bar. His legion’s labors here were as cataclysmic as those he’d turned his back upon. All three of the bar’s occupants had been brutally slaughtered. Giving the scene only the most casual perusal, he crossed through the destruction to the door.

  Events inside the bar had inevitably attracted an audience outside, even at such an early hour. But the velocity of the wind—in which his ghost army was once more dissolved—kept all but the most adventurous, youths and children, from approaching the scene, and even they were cowed by the suspicion that the air howling around them was not entirely empty.

  They watched the blond, blood-spattered boy emerge from the bar and cross to his car, but made no attempt to apprehend him. Their scrutiny made Tommy-Ray take note of his gait. Instead of slouching he walked more upright. When they remembered the Death-Boy, he thought, let them remember someone terrible.

  From Frankenstein in Love

  ENTER VERONIQUE, CARRYING A HEAVY BOX.

  CARDINAL: Who are you?

  VERONIQUE: The doctor’s not here.

  CARDINAL: Why not?

  VERONIQUE: He’s wounded.

  CARDINAL: Badly?

  VERONIQUE: He was shot trying to make his escape. He’s dying.

  CARDINAL: Animals! How did you get in here? The children at the doors are armed. They had instructions not to let anyone in but Frankenstein.

  VERONIQUE: The boys have gone. There’s nobody here.

  CARDINAL: Oh yes, there’s a whore—(Can no longer see her) somewhere.

  What is it smells?

  VERONIQUE: Me. I came through the sewers. It’s safer.

  CARDINAL: Is there rioting?

  VERONIQUE: Not now. They have entertainments, to keep the people happy. Fire-eating—

  CARDINAL: Ha! When the Perez Junta took power they blindfolded the Democrats, gave them axes, and set them on each other. Now that’s what I call entertainment. You know they’ve shot priests, these gentlemen fire-eaters? Godless bastards. In cold blood. At the altar. Wafer in hand. The body of Christ—

  VERONIQUE: Dr. Frankenstein sends his love to you.

  CARDINAL: And mine to him. The Holy Mother bless him and keep him.

  VERONIQUE: And he sends you this. By way of farewell.

  CARDINAL: A gift?

  VERONIQUE: A gift.

  CARDINAL: He’s kind. He was the kindest man I ever knew. Too kind, with all his good works. What is this?

  VERONIQUE: A keepsake.

  CARDINAL: Is there a key?

  VERONIQUE: In the lock.

  THE CARDINAL TURNS THE KEY. A SMALL PANEL OPENS IN THE BOX.

  CARDINAL: I can barely get my hands inside. Is this some sort of game? I can see Joseph’s sense of humor in this. I know what it is. It’s the ring, isn’t it. It’s the Auschwitz ring. I’ve always coveted it. He knew. Dear Joseph. (Puts his hands in eagerly, the box makes a grinding noise) It’s empty. Ah! (Screams) Oh Christ in Heaven help me—my hands — ah! My hands!

  (Wrestles with the box) Help me woman—help me, there’s something skewering my hands. They’re being cut to ribbons. Make it release me. Make it release me. Why has he done this to me? (Screams and pulls his hands out) I’m being crucified. (His hands are transfixed by two blades, straight through the middle of the palms) Why Joseph? Why, why, why?

  VERONIQUE: This isn’t his doing.

  CARDINAL: Then who?

  VERONIQUE: You won’t remember me.

  CARDINAL: Help me.

  VERONIQUE: Veronique Flecker.

  CARDINAL: It’s excruciating.

  VERONIQUE: I was in hell last time we met, naked under his needle, faceless. But I have friends you may remember.

  THE CARDINAL COLLAPSES TO THE FLOOR AS TWO EXTRAORDINARY MONSTERS ENTER: FOLLEZOU AND MATTOS. THEY ARE DRESSED IN A PATHETIC PARODY OF CIVILIZED CLOTHING. A SUIT, MAYBE A TIE EVEN, CAN BE GLIMPSED, SHITTY AND BLOODY, MINGLED WITH GANGRENED BANDAGES AND RAGS. PHYSICALLY, THEY FORM A CONTRAST. FOLLEZOU HAS THE FACE OF A CADAVER, WELL-PUTREFIED. HIS FLESH IS DARK GREEN, GRAY, AND BROWN, WITH LIVID SORES WHERE HIS WOUNDS FESTER. MATTOS RESEMBLES A GROTESQUE FETUS, HIS CRANIUM UNNATURALLY LARGE, PALE PINK, AND ALMOST BALD. THEIR BODIES REFLECT THIS CONTRAST. FOLLEZOU SKELETAL, MATTOS PULPY-FAT. MATTOS CARRIES A BUNDLE OF TOOLS.

  VERONIQUE: Señor Edmundo Follezou. Eddie, the Cardinal.

  FOLLEZOU: My pleasure.

  VER
ONIQUE: And Salvador Mattos. Excuse me, Salvador doesn’t hear well. (Louder) Salvador.

  MATTOS: Huh?

  VERONIQUE: The Cardinal.

  MATTOS: At least he’s not fat.

  FOLLEZOU: You were present at Mattos’s marriage, Cardinal, when good Dr. Frankenstein sewed his top half to his bottom half. Do you not remember?

  CARDINAL: Help me.

  MATTOS: He seems distracted.

  CARDINAL: Somebody help me.

  FOLLEZOU: The boys ran away.

  MATTOS: They didn’t like the looks of us.

  FOLLEZOU: So we’re your only hope.

  CARDINAL: Hope? You?

  FOLLEZOU: Oh yes.

  MATTOS: Why not?

  CARDINAL: Help me then. Staunch these wounds before I drain away.

  MATTOS: No.

  CARDINAL: Why not?

  FOLLEZOU: You offend us, with that look of horror on your face.

  MATTOS: Just because we’ve been tampered with, are we any less reasonable, any less sensitive?

  FOLLEZOU: Close your eyes, listen to his voice — (Mattos sings a fragment of “Ave Maria”) Is that such a terrible sound? There’s a sweet-natured soul in there. We’re just men. I myself was a philosophy teacher before the purges. And a friend of Cicero. Remember Cicero?

  MATTOS: I was a violinist at the Opera House. I’m going to play again.

  CARDINAL: Won’t you help me? Sensitive men.

  FOLLEZOU: We are helping you.

  CARDINAL: I’m dying.

  MATTOS: There you are then.

  CARDINAL: Veronique, is that your name? Veronique, a little mercy.

  VERONIQUE: It was Follezou made the box. Fine handiwork, don’t you think? His limbs don’t have the strength to kill you personally, so he devised a trick.

  CARDINAL: Why would anyone want to kill me?

  VERONIQUE: You blessed the scalpels. CARDINAL: A joke.

  VERONIQUE: The slab was washed down with holy water.

  CARDINAL: He made me do it.

  VERONIQUE: You used to watch. Smiling. Why?

  FOLLEZOU: Please explain. I want to understand how you could be so dispassionate. I’m a man you see, who can barely stand to crush a wood louse. To do what you did—

  MATTOS: Was it morbid fascination?

  CARDINAL: I hate you.

  FOLLEZOU: Is it that simple?

  CARDINAL: I hate every living thing, and I always have.

  MATTOS: Women?

  CARDINAL: Decay. Flatulence. Grease.

  MATTOS: You must know some strange women.

  CARDINAL: But Frankenstein, oh dear Joseph, he always loved humanity.

  VERONIQUE: Never.

  CARDINAL: Oh yes. He had a passion for its intricacies, its strength, its elasticity. So he wanted to stretch it, shape it, remake it by his own rules. To make a law for the flesh, a physical morality he called it. I just saw a bloodletter, a tormentor. And it pleased me, watching him silence their complaints, sluice out their minds with agonies. I’d put my finger, sometimes, into their hot heads, buried in thought up to the knuckle, and see their lives go out a little further with each prod. That pleased me too. He worked out of love, I out of loathing.

  MATTOS: Sounds like the perfect marriage.

  FOLLEZOU: I understand. Thank you.

  CARDINAL: He claimed he was sowing seeds that would one day change humanity. Drawing the sap out of vivisected fetuses and injecting it—

  VERONIQUE: I don’t want to hear.

  MATTOS: I do. It makes me feel better hearing about people who are worse off.

  CARDINAL: You for one.

  VERONIQUE: I know.

  CARDINAL: He tampered with you endlessly. You’re just a jug, full of him.

  VERONIQUE: No.

  CARDINAL: He’s changing you from inside.

  MATTOS: She has pains.

  VERONIQUE: Mattos.

  MATTOS: Why not tell him? Her body—

  VERONIQUE: You want to see the part of me that’s sprouting wings? Or the fur? Or the feathers? You want to know what I crave these days, to eat, to drink, to sleep with?

  MATTOS: I don’t think he does.

  FOLLEZOU: I think he’s had enough. Lucky man.

  CARDINAL: Will you let me go now?

  FOLLEZOU: More or less.

  CARDINAL: Help me before I’m bled white.

  MATTOS: That’s the idea.

  CARDINAL: The idea?

  MATTOS: To bleed you. We’ve no taste for blood. Lots of protein, but it makes me sick. It’s the meat I want.

  FOLLEZOU: We want.

  CARDINAL: No.

  VERONIQUE: They intend to eat you.

  CARDINAL: No!

  FOLLEZOU: I think it’s time we took him away. His noise offends our lady.

  CARDINAL: No! No! No!

  FOLLEZOU: Maybe into the crypt.

  CARDINAL: No! No! No!

  MATTOS: For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.

  FOLLEZOU AND MATTOS DRAG HIM AWAY.

  From The Damnation Game

  Whenwere you born Marty?”

  “Nineteen forty-eight. December.”

  “The war was over.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know what you missed.”

  It was an odd beginning for a confession.

  “Such times.”

  “You had a good war?”

  Whitehead reached for one of the less damaged chairs and righted it; then he sat down. For several seconds he didn’t say anything.

  “I was a thief, Marty,” he said at last. “Well … black marketeer has a more impressive ring, I suppose, but it amounts to the same thing. I was able to speak three or four languages adequately, and I was always quick-witted. Things fell my way very easily.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “Luck had no bearing on it. Luck’s out for people with no control. I had control; though I didn’t know it at the time. I made my own luck, if you like.” He paused. “You must understand, war isn’t like you see in the cinema; or at least my war wasn’t. Europe was falling apart. Everything was in flux. Borders were changing, people were being shipped into oblivion: the world was up for grabs.” He shook his head. “You can’t conceive of it. You’ve always lived in a period of relative stability. But war changes the rules you live by. Suddenly it’s good to hate, it’s good to applaud destruction. People are allowed to show their true selves—”

  Marty wondered where this introduction was taking them, but Whitehead was just getting into the rhythm of his telling. This was no time to divert him.

  “And when there’s so much uncertainty all around, the man who can shape his own destiny can be king of the world. Forgive the hyperbole, but it’s how I felt. King of the World. I was clever, you see. Not educated, that came later, but clever. Streetwise, you’d call it now. And I was determined to make the most of this wonderful war God had sent me. I spent two or three months in Paris, just before the Occupation, then got out while the going was good. Later on, I went south. Enjoyed Italy; the Mediterranean. I wanted for nothing. The worse the war became, the better it was for me. Other people’s desperation made me into a rich man.

  “Of course I frittered the money away. Never really held on to my earnings for more than a few months. When I think of the paintings that went through my hands, the objets d’art, the sheer loot. Not that I knew that when I pissed in the bucket I splashed a Raphael. I bought and sold these things by the Jeep load.

  “Toward the end of the European war I took off north, into Poland. The Germans were in a bad way: they knew the game was coming to an end, and I thought I could strike a few deals. Eventually—it was an error really—I wound up in Warsaw. There was practically nothing left by the time I got there. What the Russians hadn’t flattened, the Nazis had. It was one wasteland from end to end.” He sighed, and pulled a face, making an effort to find the words. “You can’t imagine it,” he said. “This had been a great city. But now? How can I make you und
erstand? You have to see through my eyes, or none of this makes sense.”

  “I’m trying,” Marty said.

  “You live in yourself,” Whitehead went on. “As I live in myself. We have very strong ideas of what we are. That’s why we value ourselves; by what’s unique in us. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

  Marty was too involved to lie. He shook his head.

  “No; not really.”

  “The isness of things: that’s my point. The fact that everything of any value in the world is very specifically itself. We celebrate the individuality of appearance, of being, and I suppose we assume that some part of that individuality goes on forever, if only in the memory of the people who experienced it. That’s why I valued Evangeline’s collection, because I delight in the special thing. The vase that’s unlike any other, the carpet woven with special artistry.”

  Then suddenly, they were back in Warsaw—

  “There’d been such glories there, you know. Fine houses; beautiful churches; great collections of paintings. So much. But by the time I arrived it was all gone, pounded to dust.

  “Everywhere you walked it was the same. Underfoot there was muck. Gray muck. It caked your boots, its dust hung in the air, it coated the back of your throat. When you sneezed, your snot was gray; your shit the same. And if you looked closely at this filth you could see it wasn’t just dirt, it was flesh, it was rubble, it was porcelain fragments, newspapers. All of Warsaw was in that mud. Its houses, its citizens, its art, its history: all ground down to something that you scraped off your boots.”

  Whitehead was hunched up. He looked his seventy years; an old man lost in remembering. His face was knotted up, his hands were fists. He was older than Marty’s father would have been had he survived his lousy heart: except that his father would never have been able to speak this way. He’d lacked the power of articulation, and, Marty thought, the depth of pain. Whitehead was in agonies. The memory of muck. More than that: the anticipation of it.

  Thinking of his father, of the past, Marty alighted upon a memory that made some sense of Whitehead’s reminiscences. He’d been a boy of five or six when a woman who’d lived three doors down the terrace died. She’d had no relatives apparently, or none that cared sufficiently to remove what few possessions she’d had from the house. The council had reclaimed the property and summarily emptied it, carting off her furniture to be auctioned. The day after, Marty and his playmates had found some of the dead woman’s belongings dumped in the alley behind the row of houses. The council workmen, pressed for time, had simply emptied all the drawers of worthless personal effects into a pile, and left them there. Bundles of ancient letters roughly tied up with faded ribbon; a photograph album (she was there repeatedly: as a girl; as a bride; as a middle-aged harridan, diminishing in size as she dried up); much valueless bric-a-brac; sealing wax, inkless pens, a letter opener. The boys had fallen on these leavings like hyenas in search of something nourishing. Finding nothing, they scattered the torn-up letters down the alley; they dismembered the album, and laughed themselves silly at the photographs, although some superstition in them prevented them tearing those. They had no need to do so. The elements soon vandalized them more efficiently than their best efforts could have done. In a week of rain and night frost the faces on the photographs had been spoiled, dirtied, and finally eroded entirely. Perhaps the last existing portraits of people now dead went to mush in that alley, and Marty, passing down it daily, had watched the gradual extinction; seen the ink on the scattered letters rained off until the old woman’s memorial was gone away utterly, just as her body had gone. If you’d up-ended the tray that held her ashes on to the trampled remains of her belongings they would have been virtually indistinguishable: both gray dirt, their significance irretrievably lost. Muck held the whip hand.