by Clive Barker
As if this weren’t enough, there was a further twist to the trick, for somehow in the flux they’d exchanged genders, to stand finally—quite separate once more—in their partner’s place.
Love’s like that, the monkey had said. Here was the point proved, in flesh and blood.
As the performers bowed, and fresh applause broke out, Cal detached himself from the crowd and began to wander back through the trees. Several vague thoughts were in his head. One, that he couldn’t linger here all night, and should soon go in search of Suzanna. Another that it might be wise to seek a guide. The monkey, perhaps?
But first, the laden branches drew his eye again. He reached, took another handful of fruit, and began to peel. Lo’s ad hoc vaudeville was still going on behind him. He heard laughter, then more applause, and the music began again.
He felt his limbs growing heavier; his fingers were barely the equal of the peeling; his eyelids drooped. Deciding he’d better sit down before he fell down, he settled beneath one of the trees.
Drowsiness was claiming him, and he had no power to resist it. There was no harm in dozing for a while. He was safe here, in the wash of starlight and applause. His eyes flickered closed. It seemed he could see his dreams approaching—their light growing brighter, their voices louder. He smiled to greet them.
It was his old life he dreamed.
He stood in the shuttered room that lay between his ears and let the lost days appear on the wall like a lantern show; moments retrieved from some stockpile he hadn’t even known he’d owned. But the scenes that were paraded before him now—these passages from the unfinished book of his life—no longer seemed quite real. It was fiction, that book; or at best momentarily real, when some part of him had leaped from that stale story, and glimpsed the Fugue in waiting.
The sound of applause called him to the surface of sleep, and his eyes flickered open. The stars were still set among the branches of the Giddy trees; there was still laughter and flame light near at hand; all was well with his newfound land.
I wasn’t born ‘til now, he thought, as the lantern show returned. I wasn’t even born.
Content with that thought, his mind’s eye peeled another of Lo’s sweet fruits, and put it to his lips.
Somewhere, somebody was applauding him. Hearing it, he took a bow. But this time he did not wake.
ELEVEN
MAKING AND UNMAKING
In non-Western cosmologies the beginning and the end are not the defining moments of a story made to frighten us into righteousness, but two parts of a loop of possibilities. Deities both make and unmake, often in the same instant. It’s as though the Madonna were re-created with the Holy Child nestled in the crook of one arm, and an arsenal of assassins’ knives in the other.
Art can show us this process at work: make an entertainment of it, even. And sometimes the tension between a Western, or more correctly a Judeo-Christian, view and that of a cyclic cosmology becomes part of the drama. In Galilee, for instance, the narrator, Maddox Barbarossa, is motivated to set down all that he knows about the world before it ends, only to find—as the story unfolds—that it contains evidence of its own continuation. In Weaveworld a scene of apocalyptic destruction houses the seeds of its own strange renewal. Even in The Thief of Always, a book written primarily for children, a metaphysical system is at work. As Harvey Swick unmakes his enemy, Mr. Hood, the dying villain gives up the souls he’s stolen and his victims are resurrected. In the same moment Hood’s oldest servant happily goes to her death, released from the burden of living. It becomes impossible to judge where the making ends and the unmaking begins. It’s all one.
From Galilee
What must I do, in the time remaining? Only everything. I don’t yet know how much I know; but it’s a great deal. There are vast tracts of my nature I never knew existed until now. I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn’t want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion. I daresay most of us live in such pitiful realms. It takes something profound to transform us; to open our eyes to our own glorious diversity.
Now my eyes were open, and I had no doubt that with my sight came great responsibility. I had to write about what I saw; I had to put it into the words that appear on the very pages you are reading.
But I could bear the weight of that responsibility. Gladly. For now I had the answer to the question: what lay at the center of all the threads of my story? It was myself. I wasn’t an abstracted recanter of these lives and loves. I was—I am — the story itself; its source, its voice, its music. Perhaps to you that doesn’t seem like much of a revelation. But for me, it changes everything. It makes me see, with brutal clarity, the person I once was. It makes me understand for the first time who I am now. And it makes me shake with anticipation of what I must become.
I must tell you not only how the living human world fared, but also how it went among the animals, and among those who had passed from life, yet still wandered the earth. I must tell you about those creatures God made, but also of those who made themselves by force of will or appetite. In other words, there must inevitably be unholy business here, just as there will be sacred, but I cannot guarantee to tell you—or even sometimes to know—which is which.
And in my heart I realize I want most to romance you; to share with you a vision of the world that puts order where there has been discordance and chaos. Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty. And it is my duty to sweat until I convince you of the same. Sometimes the stories will recount epic events—wars and insurrection; the fall of dynasties. Sometimes they’ll seem, by contrast, inconsequential, and you’ll wonder what business they have in these pages. Bear with me. Think of these fragments as the shavings off a carpenter’s floor, swept together after some great work has been made. The masterpiece has been taken from the workshop, but what might we learn from a study of some particular curl of wood about the moment of creation? How here the carpenter hesitated, or there moved to complete a form with unerring certainty? Are these shavings then, that seem at first glance redundant, not also part of the great work, being that which has been removed to reveal it?
I won’t be staying here at L’Enfant, searching for these shavings. We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk Road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where the Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.
Only everything: prophets, poets, soldiers, dogs, birds, fishes, lovers, potentates, beggars, ghosts. Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities, and show you the loveliness of filth.
Wait! What am I saying? There’s a kind of madness in my pen; promising all this. It’s suicidal. I’m bound to fail. But it’s what I want to do. Even if I make a wretched fool of myself in the process, it’s what I want to do.
I want to show you bliss; my own, among others. And I will most certainly show you despair. That I promise you without the least hesitation. Despair so deep it will lighten your heart to discover that others suffer so much more than you do.
And how will it all end? This showing, this failing. Honestly? I don’t have the slightest idea.
Sitting here, looking out across the lawn, I wonder how far from the borders of our strange li
ttle domain the invading world is. Weeks away? Months away? A year? I don’t believe any of us here know the answer to that question. Even Cesaria, with all her powers of prophecy, couldn’t tell me how fast the enemy will be upon us. All I know is that they will come. Must come, indeed, for everybody’s sake. I no longer cling to the idea of this house as a blessed refuge for enchantment. Perhaps it was once that. But it has fallen into decadence; its fine ambitions rotted. Better it be taken apart, hopefully with some measure of dignity; but if not, not.
All I want now is the time to enchant you. After that, I suppose I’m history, just as this house is history. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t both end up at the bottom of the swamp together. And truth to tell, that prospect doesn’t entirely distress me, as long as I’ve done all I need to do before I go.
Which is only everything.
From Weaveworld
Always, worlds within worlds.
In the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, the Weave; in the Weave, the Fugue; in the Fugue, the world of Mimi’s book, and now this: the Gyre.
But nothing that she’d seen in the pages or places she’d visited could have prepared Suzanna for what she found waiting behind the Mantle.
For one thing, though it had seemed as she stepped through the cloud-curtain that there’d been only night awaiting her on the other side, that darkness had been an illusion.
The landscape of the Gyre was lit with an amber phosphorescence that rose from the very earth beneath her feet. The reversal upset her equilibrium completely. It was almost as if the world had turned over, and she was treading the sky. And the true heavens? They were another wonder. The clouds pressed low, their innards in perpetual turmoil, as if at the least provocation they’d rain lightning on her defenseless head.
When she’d advanced a few yards she glanced behind her. just to be certain that she knew the route back. But the door, and the battlefield of the Narrow Bright beyond, had already disappeared; the cloud was no longer a curtain but a wall. A spasm of panic clutched her belly. She soothed it with the thought that she wasn’t alone here. Somewhere up ahead was Cal.
But where? Though the light from the ground was bright enough for her to walk by, it—and the fact that the landscape was so barren — conspired to make a nonsense of distance. She couldn’t be certain whether she was seeing twenty yards ahead of her, or two hundred. Whichever, there was no sign of human presence within range of her eyesight. All she could do was follow her nose, and hope to God she was heading in the right direction.
And then, a fresh wonder. At her feet, a trail had appeared; or rather two trails, intermingled. Though the earth was impacted and dry—so much so that neither Shadwell nor Cal’s footfalls had left an indentation, where the invaders had trodden the ground seemed to be vibrating. That was her first impression, at least. But as she followed their route the truth became apparent: the soil along the path pursuer and pursued had taken was sprouting.
She stopped walking and went down on her haunches to confirm the phenomenon. Her eyes weren’t misleading her. The earth was cracking, and yellow-green tendrils, their strength out of all proportion to their size, were corkscrewing up out of the cracks, their growth so fast she could watch it happening. Was this some elaborate defense mechanism on the Gyre’s part? Or had those ahead of her carried seeds into this sterile world, which the raptures here had urged into immediate life? She looked back. Her own route was similarly marked, the shoots only just appearing, while those in Cal and Shadwell’s path—with a minute or more’s headway—were already six inches high. One was uncurling like a fern; another had pods; a third was spiny. At this rate of growth they’d be trees within an hour.
Extraordinary as the spectacle was, she had no time to study it. Following this trail of proliferating life, she pressed on.
Though she’d picked up her pace to a trot, there was still no sign of those she was following. The flowering path was the only proof of their passing.
She was soon obliged to run well off the trail, for the plants, growing at exponential rate, were spreading laterally as well as vertically. As they swelled it became clear how little they had in common with the Kingdom’s flora. If they had sprung from seeds brought in on human heels, the enchantments here had wrought profound changes in them.
Indeed the resemblance was less to a jungle than to some undersea reef, not least because the plants’ prodigious growth made them sway as if moved by a tide. Their colors and their forms were utterly various; not one was like its neighbor. All they had in common was their enthusiasm for growth, for fruitfulness. Clouds of scented pollen were being expelled like breaths; pulsing blossoms were turning their heads to the clouds, as if the lightning was a kind of sustenance; roots were spreading underfoot with such violence the earth trembled.
Yet there was nothing threatening in this surge of life. The eagerness here was simply the eagerness of the new born. They grew for the pleasure of growing.
Then, from off to her right, she heard a cry; or something like a cry. Was it Cal? No; there was no sign of the trail dividing. It came again, somewhere between a sob and a sigh. It was impossible to ignore, despite her mission. Promising herself only the briefest of detours, she followed the sound.
Distance was so deceptive here. She’d advanced perhaps two dozen yards from the trail when the air unveiled the source of the sound.
It was a plant, the first living thing she’d seen here beyond the limits of the trail, with which it shared the same multiplicity of forms and brilliance of color. It was the size of a small tree, its heart a knot of boughs so complex she suspected it must be several plants growing together in one spot. She heard rustling in the blossom-laden thicket, and among the serpentine roots, but she couldn’t see the creature whose call had brought her here.
Something did become apparent, however: that the knot at the center of the tree, all but lost among the foliage, was a human corpse. If she needed further confirmation it was in plain sight. Fragments of a fine suit, hanging from the boughs like the sloughed skins of executive snakes; a shoe, parceled up in tendrils. The clothes had been shredded so that the dead flesh could be claimed by flora; green life springing up where red had failed. The corpse’s legs had grown woody, and sprouted knotted roots; shoots were exploding from its innards.
There was no time to linger and look; she had work to do. She made one circuit of the tree, and was about to return to the path when she saw a pair of living eyes staring out at her from the leaves. She yelped. They blinked. Tentatively, she reached forward, and parted the twigs.
The head of the man she’d taken for dead was on almost back to front, and his skull had been cracked wide open. But everywhere the wounds had bred sumptuous life. A beard, lush as new grass, grew around a mossy mouth which ran with sap; floret-laden twigs broke from the cheeks.
The eyes watched her intently, and she felt moist tendrils reaching up to investigate her face and hair.
Then, its blossoms shaking as it drew breath, the hybrid spoke. One long, soft word.
“Amialive.”
Was it naming itself? When she’d overcome her surprise, she told it she didn’t understand.
It seemed to frown. There was a fall of petals from its crown of flowers. The throat pulsed, and then regurgitated the syllables, this time better punctuated.
“Am ia live?”
“Are you alive?” she said, comprehending now. “Of course. Of course you’re alive.”
“I thought I was dreaming,” it said, its eyes wandering from its perusal of her a while, then returning. “Dead, or dreaming. Or both. One moment … bricks in the air, breaking my head …”
“Shearman’s house?” she said.
“Ah. You were there?”
“The Auction. You were at the Auction.”
It laughed to itself, and its humor tingled against her cheek.
“I always wanted … to be inside …,” he said, “inside …”
And now she understood the how and why of this. Th
ough it was odd to think—odd? it was incredible—that this creature had been one of Shadwell’s party, that was what she construed. Injured, or perhaps killed in the destruction of the house, he’d somehow been caught up in the Gyre, which had turned his broken body to this flowering purpose.
Her face must have registered her distress at his state, for the tendrils empathized, and grew jittery.
“So I’m not dreaming then,” the hybrid said.
“No.”
“Strange,” came the reply. “I thought I was. It’s so like paradise.” She wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Paradise?” she said.
“I never dared hope … life would be such pleasure.”
She smiled. The tendrils were soothed.
“This is Wonderland,” the hybrid said.
“Really?”
“Oh yes. We’re near to where the Weave began; near to the Temple of the Loom. Here everything transforms, everything becomes. Me? I was lost. Look at me now. How I am!”
Hearing his boast her mind went back to the adventures she’d had in the book; how, in that no-man’s-land between words and the world, everything had been transforming and becoming, and her mind, married in hatred with Hobart’s, had been the energy of that condition. She the warp to his weft. Thoughts from different skulls, crossing, and making a material place from their conflict.
It was all part of the same procedure.
The knowledge was slippery; she wanted an equation in which she could fix the lesson, in case she could put it to use. But there were more pressing issues now than the higher mathematics of the imagination.
“I must go,” she said.
“Of course you must.”
“There are others here.”
“I saw,” said the hybrid. “Passing overhead.”
“Overhead?”
“Toward the Loom.”