The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  Vassi didn’t even turn round to see him die; she was all he ever wanted to look at again.

  He approached the mattress, crouched, and began to untie her ankles. The skin was chafed, the rope scabby with old blood. He worked at the knots systematically, finding a calm he thought he’d lost, a simple contentment in being here at the end, unable to go back, and knowing that the path ahead was deep in her.

  When her ankles were free, he began on her wrists, interrupting her view of the ceiling as he bent over her. His voice was soft.

  “Why did you let him do this to you?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “To move; even to live. Every day, agony.”

  “Yes.”

  He understood so well that total incapacity to exist.

  She felt him at her side, undressing, then laying a kiss on the sallow skin of the stomach of the body she occupied. It was marked with her workings; the skin had been stretched beyond its tolerance and was permanently criss-crossed.

  He lay down beside her, and the feel of his body against hers was not unpleasant.

  She touched his head. Her joints were stiff, the movements painful, but she wanted to draw his face up to hers. He came, smiling, into her sight, and they exchanged kisses.

  My God, she thought, we are together.

  And thinking they were together, her will was made flesh. Under his lips her features dissolved, becoming the red sea he’d dreamed of, and washing up over his face, that was itself dissolving: common waters made of thought and bone.

  Her keen breasts pricked him like arrows; his erection, sharpened by her thought, killed her in return with his only thrust. Tangled in a wash of love they thought themselves extinguished, and were.

  Outside, the hard world mourned on, the chatter of buyers and sellers continuing through the night. Eventually indifference and fatigue claimed even the eagerest merchant. Inside and out there was a healing silence: an end to losses and to gains.

  TEN

  WORLDS

  Sometimes a list can be almost enough. Thus, in this chapter you’ll find: some observations on the Western Isles; on Yzordderrex; an incident in a shanty town on the outskirts of Patashoqua; some descriptions of the Patashoquan Highway; of Mai-ké, Iahmandhas, and L’Himby; the glories of Gamut Street; the star-crossed lovers Howie and Jo-Beth, swept to the Ephemeris; Joe and Noah on the shores of Quiddity; and later, a theory advanced by Carasophia concerning the distance between Sapas Humana and the dream-sea; b’Kether Sabbat, a city in defiance of gravity; Cal Mooney in the Weaveworld, encountering Boaz and Ganza; and a performance of poems in the orchard of Lemuel Lo.

  Many of the names contained in these passages are of course invented. But I learned many years ago, from Blake and from Lord Dunsany (a now scarcely published writer of fantastic fragments), that there is something marvelous about inventing words. If they have the right music they can do more to enchant a reader in the space of a few syllables than paragraphs of poetic prose.

  From Sacrament

  There were among the Western Isles places of great historical and mythological significance; where battles had been fought and princes hid, and stories made that haunted listeners still. Tiree was not among them. The island had not passed an entirely uneventful life; but it had been at best a footnote to events that flowered in their full splendor in other places.

  There was no more obvious example of this than the exploits of St. Columba, who had in his time carried the Gospel throughout the Hebrides, founding seats of devotion and learning on a number of islands. Tiree was not thus blessed, however. The good man had lingered on the island only long enough to curse a rock in Gott Bay for the sin of letting his boat’s mooring rope slip. It would be henceforth barren, he declared. The rock was dubbed Mallachdaig, or Little Cursed One, and no seaweed had grown on it since. Columba’s associate, St. Brendan, had been in a more benign mood during his fleeting visit, and had blessed a hill, but if the blessing had conferred some inspirational power on the place nobody had noticed: there had been no revelations or spontaneous healings on the spot. The third of these visiting mystics, St. Kenneth, had caused a chapel to be built in the dunes near the township of Kilkenneth, which had been so named in the hope of persuading him to linger. The ruse had failed. Kenneth had gone on to greater things, and the dunes—more persuaded by wind than metaphysics—had subsequently buried the chapel.

  There were a handful of stories through which St. Columba and his gang did not wander, all of which remained part of the anecdotal landscape, but most of them were dispiritingly domestic in scale. A well on the side of Beinn Hough, for instance, called Tobar nan naoi beo, the Well of the Nine Living, because it had miraculously supplied a widow and her eight homeless children with a lifetime’s supply of shellfish. A pool close to the shore at Vaul where the ghost of a girl who had drowned in its depths could be seen on moonless nights, singing a lonely lullaby to lure living souls into the water with her. In short, nothing out of the ordinary; islands half the size of Tiree boasted legends far more ambitious.

  But there was a numinosity here none of the rest of the Isles possessed, and at its heart a phenomenon which would have turned St. Columba from a gentle meditative into a wild-eyed prophet had he witnessed it. In fact, this wonderment had not yet come to pass when the saint had hop-scotched through the islands, but even if it had he would most likely have been denied sight of it, for those few islanders who had glimpsed the miracle (and presently living they numbered eight) never mentioned the subject, not even to those they loved. This was the great secret of their lives, a thing unseen, yet more certain than the sun, and they were not about to dilute its enchantment by speaking of it. In fact, many of them limited their own contemplation of what they’d sensed, for fear of exhausting its power to enrapture them. Some, it was true, returned to the place where they’d been touched in the hope of a second revelation, and though none of them saw anything on their return visits, many were granted a certainty that kept them content for the rest of their lives: they left the place with the conviction that what they had failed to see had seen them. They were no longer frail mortals, who would live their lives and pass away. The power on the hill at Kenavara had witnessed them, and in that witnessing had drawn them into an immortal dance.

  For it lived in the island’s very being, this power; it moved in sand and pasture and sea and wind, and the souls it saw became part of these eternals, imperishable. Once witnessed, what did a man or woman have to fear? Nothing, except perhaps the discomforts that attended death. Once their corporeal selves were shed, however, they moved where the power moved, and witnessed as it witnessed, glory on glory. When on summer nights the Borealis drooped its color on the stratosphere, they would be there. When the whales came to breach in exaltation, they would rise, too. They would be with the kittiwakes and the hares and with every star that trembled on Loch an Eilein. It was in all things, this power. In the sandy pastures adjoining the dunes (or the machair as it was called in Gaelic); and in the richer, damper fields of the island’s midst, where the grass was lush and the cattle grazed themselves creamy.

  It did not much concern itself with the griefs and travails of those men and women who never saw it, but it kept a tally of their comings and goings. It knew who was buried in the churchyards at Kirkapol and Vaul; it knew how many babies were born each year. It even watched the visitors, in a casual fashion, not because they were as interesting as whales or kittiwakes, they weren’t, but because there might be among them some soul who would do it harm. This was not beyond the bounds of possibility. It had been witnessing long enough to have seen stars disappear from the heavens. It was not more permanent than they.

  From imajica

  Until the rise of Yzordderrex, a rise engineered by the Autarch for reasons more political than geographical, the city of Patashoqua, which lay on the edge of the Fourth Dominion, close to where the In Ovo marked the perimeter of the Reconciled worlds, had just claim to be the pr
eeminent city of the Dominions. Its proud inhabitants called it casje au casje, simply meaning the hive of hives, a place of intense and fruitful labor. Its proximity to the Fifth made it particularly prone to influences from that source, and even after Yzordderrex had become the center of power across the Dominions it was to Patashoqua that those at the cutting edge of style and invention looked for the coming thing. Patashoqua had a variation on the motor vehicle in its streets long before Yzordderrex. It had rock and roll in its clubs long before Yzordderrex. It had hamburgers, cinemas, blue jeans, and countless other proofs of modernity long before the great city of the Second. Nor was it simply the trivialities of fashion that Patashoqua reinvented from Fifth Dominion models. It was philosophies and belief systems. Indeed, it was said in Patashoqua that you knew a native of Yzordderrex because he looked like you did yesterday and believed what you’d believed the day before.

  As with most cities in love with the modern, however, Patashoqua had deeply conservative roots. Whereas Yzordderrex was a sinful city, notorious for the excesses of its darker Kesparates, the streets of Patashoqua were quiet after nightfall, its occupants in their own beds with their own spouses, plotting vogues. This mingling of chic and conservatism was nowhere more apparent than in architecture. Built as it was in a temperate region, unlike the semitropical Yzordderrex, the buildings did not have to be designed with any climatic extreme in mind. They were either elegantly classical, and built to remain standing until Doomsday, or else functions of some current craze, and likely to be demolished within a week.

  But it was on the borders of the city where the most extraordinary sights were to be seen, because it was here that a second, parasitical city had been created, peopled by inhabitants of the Four Dominions who had fled persecution and had looked to Patashoqua as a place where liberty of thought and action were still possible. How much longer this would remain the case was a debate that dominated every social gathering in the city. The Autarch had moved against other towns, cities, and states which he and his councils judged hotbeds of revolutionary thought. Some of those cities had been razed; others had come under Yzordderrexian edict and all sign of independent thought had been crushed. The university city of Hezoir, for instance, had been reduced to rubble, the brains of its students literally scooped out of their skulls and heaped up in the streets. In the Azzimulto the inhabitants of an entire province had been decimated, so rumor went, by a disease introduced into that region by the Autarch’s representatives. There were tales of atrocities from so many sources that people became almost blasé about the newest horror, until, of course, somebody asked how long it would be until the Autarch turned his unforgiving eyes on the hive of hives. Then their faces drained of color, and people talked in whispers of how they planned to escape or defend themselves if that day ever came; and they looked around at their exquisite city, built to stand until Doomsday, and wondered just how near that day was.

  Walking through the narrow spaces between the shanties was like passing through a country in which the very air had evolutionary ambition, and to breathe was to change. A hundred kinds of eye gazed out at them from doorways and windows, while a hundred forms of limb got about the business of the day—cooking, nursing, crafting, conniving, making fires and deals and love—and all glimpsed so briefly that after a few paces Gentle was obliged to look away, to study the muddy gutter they were walking in, lest his mind be overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of sights. Smells, too: aromatic, sickly, sour and sweet; and sounds that made his skull shake and his gut quiver.

  There had been nothing in his life to date, either waking or sleeping, to prepare him for this. He’d studied the masterworks of great imaginers—he’d painted a passable Goya, once, and sold an Ensor for a little fortune—but the difference between paint and reality was vast, a gap whose scale he could not by definition have known until now, when he had around him the other half of the equation. This wasn’t an invented place, its inhabitants variations on experienced phenomena. It was independent of his terms of reference: a place unto and of itself.

  When he looked up again, daring the assault of the strange, he was grateful that he and Pie were now in a quarter occupied by more human entities, though even here there were surprises. What seemed to be a three-legged child skipped across their path only to look back with a face wizened as a desert corpse, its third leg a tail. A woman sitting in a doorway, her hair being combed by her consort, drew her robes around her as Gentle looked her way, but not fast enough to conceal the fact that a second consort, with the skin of a herring and an eye that ran all the way around its skull, was kneeling in front of her, inscribing hieroglyphics on her belly with the sharpened heel of its hand. He heard a range of tongues being spoken, but English seemed to be the commonest parlance, albeit heavily accented or corrupted by the labial anatomy of the speaker. Some seemed to sing their speech; some almost to vomit it up.

  But the voice that called to them from one of the crowded alleyways off to their right might have been heard on any street in London: a lisping, pompous holler demanding they halt in their tracks. They looked in its direction. The throng had divided to allow the speaker and his party of three easy passage.

  “Play dumb,” Pie muttered to Gentle as the lisper, an overfed gargoyle, bald but for an absurd wreath of oiled kiss curls, approached.

  He was finely dressed, his high black boots polished and his canary yellow jacket densely embroidered after what Gentle would come to know as the present Patashoquan fashion. A man much less showily garbed followed, an eye covered by a patch that trailed the tail feathers of a scarlet bird as if echoing the moment of his mutilation. On his shoulders he carried a woman in black, with silvery scales for skin and a cane in her tiny hands with which she tapped her mount’s head to speed him on his way. Still farther behind came the oddest of the four.

  “A Nullianac,” Gentle heard Pie murmur.

  He didn’t need to ask if this was good news or bad. The creature was its own best advertisement, and it was selling harm. Its head resembled nothing so much as praying hands, the thumbs leading and tipped with lobster’s eyes, the gap between the palms wide enough for the sky to be seen through it, but flickering, as arcs of energy passed from side to side. It was without question the ugliest living thing Gentle had ever seen. If Pie had not suggested they obey the edict and halt, Gentle would have taken to his heels there and then, rather than let the Nullianac get one stride closer to them.

  The lisper had halted and now addressed them afresh. “What business have you in Vanaeph?” he wanted to know.

  “We’re just passing through,” Pie said, a reply somewhat lacking in invention, Gentle thought.

  “Who are you?” the man demanded.

  “Who are you?” Gentle returned.

  The patch-eyed mount guffawed and got his head slapped for his troubles.

  “Loitus Hammeryock,” the lisper replied.

  “My name’s Zacharias,” Gentle said, “and this is—”

  “Casanova,” Pie said, which earned him a quizzical glance from Gentle.

  “Zooical!” the woman said. “D’yee speakat te gloss?”

  “Sure,” said Gentle. “I speakat te gloss.”

  “Be careful,” Pie whispered at his side.

  “Bone! Bone!” the woman went on, and proceeded to tell them, in a language which was two parts English, or a variant thereof, one part Latin, and one part some Fourth Dominion dialect that consisted of tongue clicks and teeth tappings, that all strangers to this town, Neo Vanaeph, had to register their origins and intentions before they were allowed access: or, indeed, the right to depart. For all its ramshackle appearance, Vanaeph was no lawless stew, it appeared, but a tightly policed township, and this woman—who introduced herself in this flurry of lexicons as Pontiff Farrow—was a significant authority here.

  When she’d finished, Gentle cast a confounded look in Pie’s direction. This was proving more difficult terrain by the moment. Unconcealed in the Pontiff’s speech was threat o
f summary execution if they failed to answer their inquiries satisfactorily. The executioner among this party was not hard to spot: he of the prayerful head—the Nullianac—waiting in the rear for his instructions.

  “So,” said Hammeryock. “We need some identification.”

  “I don’t have any,” Gentle said.

  “And you?” he asked the mystif, which also shook its head.

  “Spies,” the Pontiff hissed.

  “No, we’re just … tourists,” Gentle said.

  “Tourists?” said Hammeryock.

  “We’ve come to see the sights of Patashoqua.” He turned to Pie for support. “Whatever they are.”

  “The tombs of the Vehement Loki Lobb,” Pie said, clearly scratching around for the glories Patashoqua had to offer, “and the Merrow Ti’ Ti’.”

  That sounded pretty to Gentle’s ears. He faked a broad smile of enthusiasm. “The Merrow Ti’ Ti’!” he said. “Absolutely! I wouldn’t miss the Merrow Ti’ Ti’ for all the tea in China.”

  “China?” said Hammeryock.

  “Did I say China?”

  “You did.”

  “Fifth Dominion,” the Pontiff muttered. “Spiatits from the Fifth Dominion.”

  “I object strongly to that accusation,” said Pie ‘oh’ pah.

  “And so,” said a voice behind the accused, “do I.”

  Both Pie and Gentle turned to take in the sight of a scabrous, bearded individual, dressed in what might generously have been described as motley and less generously as rags, standing on one leg and scraping shit off the heel of his other foot with a stick.

  “It’s the hypocrisy that turns my stomach. Hammeryock,” he said, his expression a maze of wiles. “You two pontificate,” he went on, eyeing his pun’s target as he spoke, “about keeping the streets free from undesirables, but you do nothing about the dog shite!”

  “This isn’t your business, Tick Raw,” Hammeryock said.