by Clive Barker
It all meant nothing. Nothing at all.
Boom —
Boom —
Popolac walked, the noise of its steps receding to the east. Popolac walked, the hum of its voice lost in the night.
After a day, birds came, foxes came, flies, butterflies, wasps came. Judd moved, Judd shifted, Judd gave birth. In his belly maggots warmed themselves, in a vixen’s den the good flesh of his thigh was fought over. After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones crumbling: soon, an empty space which he had once filled with breath and opinions.
Darkness, light, darkness, light. He interrupted neither with his name.
NINE
THE BODY
If the genre we conventionally call “fantasy” has been largely defined by its concern with landscapes (we think of the “world” of these books before we think of the people who populate that world) then the genre we dub “horror” has been about the most intimate landscape of all: the body. The mutability of the flesh has often been the wellspring from which horror fiction has taken its power.
I’ve tried to reappraise these conventions in my stories. Here are four examples of that reappraisal. One, “Jacqueline Ess: Her Last Will and Testament,” is probably a horror story, in that it elicits, at times, a sense of revulsion. But it turns into something altogether stranger by the end, a kind of brutal romance, in which the site of coitus is not simply the genitals, but the entire body. I put beside it a passage from Imajica which visits the same territory, but within the context of what is essentially a religious quest novel. Here, the marriage of flesh is more surreal than in “Jacqueline Ess,” but there is a similarity of intention. The lovers want to go beyond the limits of the physical: to transgress in pursuit of the ultimate union.
The other two pieces in this chapter are both from Sacrament, which is neither a horror novel nor a fantasy novel. It has no invented worlds, and its imagery is seldom horrific. But it does have a character—its hero, Will Rabjohns—whose flesh is protean.
In these scenes we see him first discover the vision that flickers inside him, then he goes out on the town, wearing its skin. Or does he? Is Will a were-fox, or simply a man who turns into an animal when he gets a hard-on (which might be said for many of us)? The book provides no simple answers. It allows the readers plenty of room to inform the text with their own knowledge of what the body is capable of being and becoming.
From Sacrament
That night, around eleven or so, he decided to forgo a sleeping pill and go out for a drink. It was Friday, so the streets were alive and kicking, and on the five-minute walk up Sanchez to 16th he met the appreciative eyes of enough guys to be certain he could get lucky tonight if the urge took him. Some of that cockiness was knocked out of him, however, when he stepped into the Gestalt, a bar which according to Jack (whom he’d called for the inside scoop) had opened two months before and was the hot place for the summer. It was filled to near capacity, some of the customers locals here for a casual beer with friends, but many more geared up and wired for the weekend. In the old days there had been certain tribal divisions in the Castro: leather men had their watering-holes, drug aficionados, theirs; the preppie boys had gathered in a different spot than the hustlers; the queens, especially the older guys, would never have been seen in a black bar, or vice versa. Here, however, there were representatives of every one of those clans, and more. Was that a man in a rubber suit, leaning against the bar sipping his bourbon? Yes it was. And the guy waiting his turn at the pool table, his nose pierced and his hair carved in concentric circles, was he the lover of the Latino man in the well-cut suit who was making a beeline for him? To judge by their smiles and kisses, yes. There was even a good proportion of women in the throng; a few, Will thought, straight girls come to ogle the queers with their boyfriends (this was a risky business; any boyfriend who agreed to the trip was probably half-hoping to be gang-banged on the pool table), the rest lesbians (again, of every variation, from the kittenish to the mustached). Though he was a little intimidated at the sheer exuberance of the scene, he was too much of a voyeur to leave. He eased his way through the crowd to the bar, and found a niche at the far end where he had a wide-angle view of the room. Two beers in, and he started to feel a little more mellow. Excepting a few glances cast his way nobody took much notice of him, which was fine, he told himself, just fine. And then, as he was ordering a third beer (his last for the night, he’d decided) somebody stepped up to the bar beside him and said: “I’ll have the same. No I won’t. I’ll have a tequila straight up. And he’s paying.”
“I am?” said Will, looking around at a man maybe five years his junior, whose present hapless expression he vaguely knew. Narrowed brown eyes watched him under upturned brows, a smile, with dimples, waited in readiness for when Will said —
“Drew?”
“Shit! I shoulda taken the bet. I was with this guy—” He glanced back down the bar at a husky fellow in a leather jacket; the guy waved, obviously chomping at the bit for an invitation to join them. Drew looked back at Will, “He said you wouldn’t recognize me after all this time. I said betcha. And you did.”
“It took a moment.”
“Yeah. Well … the hairline’s not what it used to be,” Drew said. A decade and a half before, when they’d had their fling, Drew had sported a curly clump of golden brown hair that hung over his forehead, its most ambitious curls tickling the bridge of his nose. Now it was gone. “You don’t mind?” he said. “The tequila, I mean? I wasn’t even sure it was you at first. I mean I heard … well, you know what you hear. I don’t know half the time what to believe and what not to believe.”
“You heard I was dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” said Will, clinking his beer can against Drew’s brimming glass of tequila. “I’m not.”
“Good,” Drew said, clinking back. “Are you still living in the city?”
“I just returned.”
“You bought a house on Sanchez, right?” Their affair had preceded the purchase, and upon its cooling they’d not remained friends. “Still got it?”
“Still got it.”
“I dated somebody on Sanchez, and he pointed it out to me. ‘That’s where the famous photographer lives.’” Drew’s eyes widened at the quoted description. “Of course, I didn’t know who. Then he told me and I said—”
“Oh, him.”
“No, I was really proud,” Drew said, with sweet sincerity. “I don’t keep up with art stuff, you know, so I hadn’t really put two and two together. I mean, I knew you took pictures, but I just remembered seals.”
Will roared with laughter. “Christ, the seals!”
“You remember? We went to Pier 39 together? I thought we were going to get buzzed and watch the ocean, but you got obsessed with the seals. I was so pissed off.” He emptied half his tequila glass in one. “Funny, the things that stick in your head.”
“Your buddy’s waving at you, by the way,” Will said.
“Oh, Lord. It’s a sad case. I had one date with him and now every time I come in here he’s all over me.”
“Do you need to get back to him?”
“Absolutely not. Unless you want to be on your own? I mean, you’ve got the pick of the crowd here.”
“I wish.”
“You’re still in great shape,” Drew said. “I’m kinda running to seed here.” He looked down at a belly that was no longer the washboard it had been. “It took me an hour to put these jeans on, and it’ll take me twice as long to get ‘em off.” He glanced up at Will. “Without help, that is,” he said. He patted his stomach. “You took some pictures of me, do you remember?”
Will remembered: a sticky afternoon of beefcake and baby oil. Drew had been quite the muscle-boy back then, competition standards, and proud of it. A little too proud perhaps. They’d broken up on Halloween Night, when he’d found Drew stark naked and painted gold from head to foot, standing in the backyard of a house on Hancock like an ithyphallic idol surrou
nded by devotees.
“Have you still got those pictures?” Drew asked.
“Oh, I’m sure. Somewhere.”
“I’d love to see ‘em … sometime.” He shrugged, as though when was of no consequence, though both of them had known two minutes before, when he’d mentioned his jeans, that Will would be helping him out of them tonight.
As they made their way back to the house Will wondered if perhaps he’d made a mistake. Drew kept up a virtually unbroken monologue, none of it particularly enlightening, about his job selling advertising space at the Chronicle, about the unwanted attentions of Al, and the adventures of his ineptly neutered cat. A few yards from the door, however, he stopped in midflow and said: “I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I? Sorry. I’m just nervous I guess.”
“If it’s any comfort,” Will said, “so am I.”
“Really?” Drew sounded doubtful.
“I haven’t had sex with anyone in eight or nine months.”
“Jeez,” Drew said, plainly relieved. “Well we can just take it real slowly.”
They were at the front door. “That’s good,” Will said, letting them in, “slowly’s good.”
In the old days sex with Drew had been quite a show; a lot of posing and boasting and wrestling around. Tonight it was mellow. Nothing acrobatic; nothing risky. Little, in fact, beyond the simple pleasure of lying naked together in Will’s big bed with the pallid light from the street washing over their bodies, holding and being held. The greed for sensuality Will would once have felt in this situation, the need to exhaustively explore every sensation, seemed very remote. Yes, it was still there; another night, perhaps, another body—one he didn’t remember in its finest hour—and perhaps he’d be just as possessed as he’d been in the past. But for tonight, gentle pleasures and modest satisfactions. There was just one moment, as they were undressing, and Drew first saw the scars on Will’s body, when the liaison threatened to become something a little headier.
“Oh my, oh my,” Drew said, his voice breathy with admiration. “Can I touch them?”
“If you really want to.”
Drew did so; not with his fingers but with his lips, tracing the shiny path the bear’s claws had left on Will’s chest and belly. He went down on his knees in the process, and pressing his face against Will’s lower abdomen, said: “I could stay down here all night.” He’d slipped his hands behind his back; plainly he was quite ready to have them tied there if it took Will’s fancy. Will ran his fingers through the man’s hair, half-tempted to play the game. Bind him up; have him kissing scars and calling him sir. But he decided against it.
“Another night,” he said, and pulling Drew up and into his arms, escorted him to bed.
He woke to the sound of rain, pattering on the skylight overhead. It was still dark. He glanced at his watch—it was 4:15—then over to Drew, who was lying on his back, snoring slightly. Will wasn’t sure what had woken him, but now that he was conscious he decided to get up and empty his bladder. But as he eased out of bed he caught, or thought he caught, a motion in the shadows across the room. He froze. Had somebody broken into the house? Was that what had woken him? He studied the darkness, looking and listening for further signs of an intruder; but now there was nothing. The shadows were empty. He looked back at his bedmate. Drew was wearing a tiny smile in his sleep, and was rubbing his bare belly gently, back and forth. Will watched him for a moment, curiously enraptured. Of all the unlikely people to have broken his sexual fast with, he thought; Drew the muscle-boy, softened by time.
The rain got suddenly heavier, beating a tattoo on the roof. It stirred him to get up and go to the bathroom, a route he could have covered in his sleep. Out through the bedroom door, then first left onto the cold tile; three paces forward, turn to the right and he could piss in certain knowledge his aim was true. He drained his bladder contentedly, then headed back to the bedroom, thinking as he went how good it would feel to slip his arms around Drew.
Then, two paces from the door, he again glimpsed a motion from the corner of his eye. This time he was quick enough to catch sight of the intruder’s shadow, as the man made his escape down the stairs.
“Hey—” he said, and followed, thinking as he did so that there was something suspiciously playful about what was happening. For some reason he didn’t feel in the least threatened by the presence of this trespasser; it was as though he knew already there was no harm here. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, and pursued the shadow back down the hallway toward the file room he realized why: he was dreaming. And what more certain proof of that than the sight awaiting him when he entered the room? There, casually leaning on the windowsill twenty feet from him and silhouetted against the raining glass, was Lord Fox.
“You’re naked,” the creature remarked.
“So are you,” Will observed.
“It’s different for animals. We’re more comfortable in our skins.” He cocked his head. “The scars suit you.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“By the fellow in your bed?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t have him hanging around, you realize that? Not the way things are going. You’ll have to get rid of him.”
“This is a ridiculous conversation,” Will said, turning to go. “I’m heading back to bed.” He was already there, of course, and asleep, but even in dream form he didn’t want to linger down here chatting with the fox. The animal belonged to another part of his psyche; a part he’d begun to put at a healthier distance tonight, with Drew’s compliance.
“Wait a moment,” said the fox. “Just take a look at this.”
There was a crisp enthusiasm in the animal’s words that made Will glance back. There was more light in the room than there’d been moments before, its source not shed from street lamps outside, but from the photographs, his poor consumptives, which were still scattered on the floor where he’d tossed them. Leaving his place at the window Lord Fox stepped between the pictures, coming into the middle of the room. By the strange luminescence the photographs were giving off, Will could see a voluptuous smile upon the animal’s face.
“These are worth a moment’s study, don’t you think?” the fox said.
Will looked. The light that emanated from the photographs was uncertain, and for good reason. The bright, blurred forms in the pictures were moving: fluttering, flickering, as though they were being consumed by a slow fire. And in their throes, Will recognized them. A skinned lion, hanging from a tree. A pitiful tent of elephant hide, hanging in rotted scraps over one of the poles of its bones. A tribe of lunatic baboons beating each other’s children to death with rocks. Pictures of the corrupted world, no longer fixed and remote, but thrashing and twitching and blazing out into his room.
“Don’t you wish they looked like this when people saw them?” the fox said. “Wouldn’t it change the world if they could see the horror this way?”
Will glanced up at the fox. “No,” he said, “it wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Even this,” the animal said, staring down at a picture that lay between them. It was darker than the others, and at first he couldn’t make out the subject.
“What is it?”
“You tell me,” the fox said.
Will went down on his haunches and looked at the picture more closely. There was motion in this one too: a deluge of flickering light falling on a form sitting at the center of the picture.
“Patrick?” he murmured.
“Could be,” the fox replied. It was Patrick for sure. He was slumped in his chair beside his window, except that somehow the roof had been stripped off his house and the rain was pouring in, running down over his head and body, glistening on his forehead and his nose and his lips, which were drawn back a little, so that his teeth showed. He was dead, Will knew. Dead in the rain. And the more the deluge beat upon him the more his flesh bruised and swelled. Will wanted to look away. This wasn’t an ape, this wasn’t a lion, it was Patrick, his beloved Patrick. But he�
��d trained his eyes too well. They kept looking, like the good witnesses they were, while Patrick’s face smeared beneath the assault of the rain, all trace of who or even what he’d been steadily erased.
“Oh God …,” Will murmured.
“He feels nothing, if that’s any comfort,” the fox said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“So look away.”
“I can’t. It’s in my head now.” He advanced on the animal, suddenly enraged. “What the fuck have I done to deserve this?”
“That’s the mother of all questions, isn’t it?” he said, unperturbed by Will’s rage.
“And?”
The animal shrugged. “God wants you to see. Don’t ask me why. That’s between you and God. I’m just the go-between.” Flummoxed by this, Will glanced back down at the picture of Patrick. The body had disappeared, dissolved in the rain. “Sometimes it’s too much for people,” the fox went on, in its matter-of-fact fashion. “God says: take a look at this, and people just lose their sanity. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but there are no guarantees.”
“I don’t want to lose him …,” Will murmured.
“I can’t help you there,” the animal replied. “I’m just the messenger.”
“Well you tell God from me—” Will started to say.
“Will?”
There was another voice behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and there was Drew standing in the doorway, with a sheet wrapped around his middle.
“Who are you talking to?” he said.
Will looked back into the room, and for a moment—though he was now awake—he thought he glimpsed the animal’s silhouette against the glass. Then the vision was gone, and he was standing naked in the cold, with Drew coming to drape the sheet over his shoulders.
“You’re clammy,” Drew said.
He was: running with a sickly sweat. Drew put his arms around Will’s chest, locking his hands against his breastbone and laving his head against Will’s neck. “Do you often go walkabout in your sleep?”