by Clive Barker
Her head began to slip forward.
“Too late …,” she said again.
Then a shudder went through her. The body, vacated by spirit, keeled over. She lay dead in her blood.
Despite her dying words, the power here was still building. Suzanna backed toward the door, to clear the beams’ route completely. With nothing to bar their way they immediately redoubled their brilliance, and from the point of collision threw up new beams at every angle. The whispering that filled the chamber suddenly found a fresh rhythm; the words, though still alien to her, ran like a melodious poem. Somehow, they and the light were part of one system; the raptures of the four Families—Aia, Lo, Ye-me, and Babu—working together: word music accompanying a woven dance of light.
This was the Loom; of course. This was the Loom.
No wonder Immacolata had poured scorn on Shadwell’s literalism. Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind.
Yet damn it, this recognition was not enough. Finally she was still only a Cuckoo, and all the puzzle-solving in the world wouldn’t help her mellow the rage of this desecrated place. All she could do was watch the Loom’s wrath shake the Fugue and all it contained apart.
In her frustration her thoughts went to Mimi, who had brought her into this adventure, but had died too soon to entirely prepare her for it. Surely even she would not have predicted this: the Fugue’s failing, and Suzanna at its heart, unable to keep it beating.
The lights were still colliding and multiplying, the beams growing so solid now she might have walked upon them. Their performances transfixed her. She felt she could watch them forever, and never tire of their complexities. And still they grew more elaborate, more solid, until she was certain they would not be bound within the walls of the sanctum, but would burst out—
Into the Fugue, where she had to go. Out to where Cal was lying, to comfort him as best she could in the imminent maelstrom.
With this thought came another. That perhaps Mimi had known, or feared, that in the end it would simply be Suzanna and the magic—and that maybe the old woman had after all left a signpost.
She reached into her pocket, and brought out the book. Secrets of the Hidden Peoples. She didn’t need to open the book to remember the epigraph on the dedication page:
“What can be imagined need never be lost.”
She’d tussled with its meaning repeatedly, but her intellect had failed to make much sense of it. Now she forsook her analytical thinking and let subtler sensibilities take over.
The light of the Loom was so bright it hurt her eyes, and as she stepped out of the sanctum she discovered that the beams were exploiting chinks in the brick—either that or eating at the wall—and breaking through. Needle-thin lines of light stratified the passageway.
Her thoughts as much on the book in her hand as on her safety, she made her way back via the route she’d come: door and passageway, door and passageway. Even the outer layers of corridor were not immune to the Loom’s glamour. The beams had broken through three solid walls and were growing wider with every moment. As she walked through them, she felt the menstruum stir in her for the first time since she’d entered the Gyre. It rose not to her face, however, but through her arms and into her hands, which clasped the book, as though charging it.
What can be imagined—
The chanting rose; the light beams multiplied.
— need never be lost.
The book grew heavier; warmer; like a living thing in her arms. And yet, so full of dreams. A thing of ink and paper in which another world awaited release. Not one world perhaps, but many; for as she and Hobart’s time in the pages had proved, each adventurer reimagined the stories for themselves. There were as many Wild Woods as there were readers to wander there.
She was out into the third corridor now, and the whole Temple had become a hive of light and sound. There was so much energy here, waiting to be channeled. If she could only be the catalyst that turned its strength to better ends than destruction.
Her head was full of images, or fragments thereof:
She and Hobart in the forest of their story, exchanging skins and fictions;
She and Cal in the Auction Room, their glance the engine that turned the knife above the Weave.
And finally, the sentinels sitting in the Loom chamber. Eight eyes that had, even in death, the power to unmake the Weave. And … make it again?
Suddenly, she wasn’t walking any longer. She was running, not for fear that the roof would come down on her head but because the final pieces of the puzzle were coming clear, and she had so little time.
Redeeming the Fugue could not be done alone. Of course not. No rapture could be performed alone. Their essence was in exchange. That was why the Families sang and danced and wove: their magic blossomed between people: between performer and spectator, maker and admirer.
And wasn’t there rapture at work between her mind and the mind in the book she held? her eyes scanning the page and soaking up another soul’s dreams? It was like love. Or rather love was its highest form: mind shaping mind, visions pirouetting on the threads between lovers.
“Cal!”
She was at the last door, and flinging herself into the turmoil beyond.
The light in the earth had turned to the color of bruises, blue-black and purple. The sky above writhed, ripe to discharge its innards. From the music and the exquisite geometry of light inside the Temple, she was suddenly in bedlam.
Cal was propped against the wall of the Temple. His face was white, but he was alive.
She went to him and knelt by his side.
“What’s happening?” he said, his voice lazy with exhaustion.
“I’ve no time to explain,” she said, her hand stroking his face. The menstruum played against his cheek. “You have to trust me.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. You have to think for me, Cal. Think of everything you remember.”
“Remember …?”
As he puzzled at her a crack, fully a foot wide, opened in the earth, running from the threshold of the Temple like a messenger. The news it carried was all grim. Seeing it, doubts filled Suzanna. How could anything be claimed from this chaos? The sky shed thunder; dust and dirt were flung up from the crevasses that gaped on every side.
She endeavored to hold on to the comprehension she’d found in the corridors behind her. Tried to keep the images of the Loom in her head. The beams intersecting. Thought over and under thought. Minds filling the void with shared memories and shared dreams.
“Think of everything you remember about the Fugue,” she said.
“Everything?”
“Everything. All the places you’ve seen.”
“Why?”
“Trust me!” she said. “Please God, Cal, trust me. What do you remember?”
“Just bits and pieces.”
“Whatever you can find. Every little piece.”
She pressed her palm to his face. He was feverish, but the book in her other hand was hotter.
In recent times she’d shared intimacies with her greatest enemy, Hobart. Surely she could share knowledge with this man, whose sweetness she’d come to love.
“Please …,” she said.
“For you …,” he replied, seeming to know at last all she felt for him, “anything.”
And the thoughts came. She felt them flow into her, and through her; she was a conduit, the menstruum the stream on which his memories were carried. Her mind’s eye saw glimpses only of what he’d seen and felt here in the Fugue, but they were things fine and beautiful.
An orchard; firelight; fruit; people dancing; singing. A road; a field; de Bono and the rope-dancers. The Firmament (rooms full of miracles); a rickshaw; a house, with a man standing on the step. A mountain, and planets. Most of it came too fast for her to focus upon, but her
comprehension of what he’d seen wasn’t the point. She was just part of a cycle—as she’d been in the Auction Room.
Behind her, she felt the beams breaking through the last wall, as though the Loom was coming to meet her, its genius for transfiguration momentarily at her disposal. They hadn’t got long. If she missed this wave there’d be no other.
“Go on,” she said to Cal.
He had his eyes closed now, and the images were still pouring out of him. He’d remembered more than she’d dared hope. And she in her turn was adding sights and sounds to the flow —
The lake; Capra’s House; the forest; the streets of Nonesuch —
They came back, razor sharp, and she felt the beams pick them up and speed them on their way.
She’d feared the Loom would reject her interference, but not at all; it married its power to that of the menstruum, transforming all that she and Cal were remembering.
She had no control over these processes. They were beyond her grasp. All she could do was be a part of the exchange between meaning and magic, and trust that the forces at work here comprehended her intentions better than she did.
But the power behind her was growing too strong for her; she could not channel its energies much longer. The book was getting too hot to hold, and Cal was shuddering beneath her hand.
“Enough!” she said.
Cal’s eyes flew open.
“I haven’t finished.”
“Enough I said.”
As she spoke, the structure of the Temple began to shudder.
Cal said: “Oh God.”
“Time to go,” said Suzanna. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk.”
She helped him to his feet. There were roars from within, as one after another the walls capitulated to the rage of the Loom.
They didn’t wait to watch the final cataclysm, but started away from the Temple, brick-shards whining past their heads.
Cal was as good as his word: he could indeed walk, albeit slowly. But running would have been impossible in the wasteland they were now obliged to cross. As Creation had been the touchstone of the outward journey, wholesale Destruction marked their return. The flora and fauna that had sprung into being in the footsteps of the trespassers were now suffering a swift dissolution. Flowers and trees were withering, the stench of their rot carried on the hooligan winds that scoured the Gyre.
With the earth-light dimmed, the scene was murky, the gloom further thickened by dust and airborne matter. From the darkness animal cries rose as the earth opened and consumed the very creatures it had produced mere minutes before. Those not devoured by the bed from which they’d sprung were subject to a fate still more terrible, as the powers that had made them unknitted their children. Pale, skeletal things that had once been bright and alive now littered the landscape, breathing their last. Some turned their eyes up to Cal and Suzanna, looking for hope or help, but they had none to offer.
It was as much as they could do to keep the cracks in the earth from claiming them too. They stumbled on, arms about each other, heads bowed beneath a barrage of hailstones which the Mantle, as though to perfect their misery, had unleashed.
“How far?” Cal said.
They halted and Suzanna stared ahead; she could not be certain they were not simply walking in circles. The light at their feet was now all but extinguished. Here and there it flared up, but only to illuminate another pitiable scene: the last wracking moments of the glory that their presence here had engendered.
Then:
“There!” she said, pointing through the curtain of hail and dust. “I see a light”
They set off again, as fast as the suppurating earth would allow. With every step, their feet sank deeper into a swamp of decaying matter, in which the remnants of life still moved; the inheritors of this Eden: worms and cockroaches.
But there was a distinct light at the end of the tunnel; she glimpsed it again through the thick air.
“Look up, Cal,” she said.
He did just that, though only with effort.
“Not far now. A few more steps.”
He was becoming heavier by the moment; but the tear in the Mantle was sufficient to spur them on over the last few yards of treacherous earth.
And finally they stepped out into the light, almost spat from the entrails of the Gyre as it went into its final convulsions.
They stumbled away from the Mantle, but not far before Cal said:
“I can’t …,” and fell to the ground.
She knelt beside him, cradling his head, then looked around for help. Only then did she see the consequences of events in the Gyre.
Wonderland had gone.
The glories of the Fugue had been shredded and torn, their tatters evaporating even as she watched. Water, wood, and stone; living animal tissue and dead Seerkind: all gone, as though it had never been. A few remnants lingered, but not for long. As the Gyre thundered and shook, these last signs of the Fugue’s terrain became smoke and threads, then empty air. It was horribly quick.
Suzanna looked behind her. The Mantle was receding too, now that it had nothing left to conceal, its retreat uncovering a wasteland of dirt and fractured rock. Even its thunder was diminishing.
“Suzanna!”
She looked back to see de Bono coming toward her.
“What happened in there?”
“Later,” she said. “First, we have to get help for Cal. He’s been shot.”
“I’ll fetch a car.”
Cal’s eyes flickered open.
“Is it gone?” he murmured.
“Don’t think about it now,” she said.
“I want to know,” he demanded, with surprising vehemence, and struggled to sit up. Knowing he wouldn’t be placated, Suzanna helped him.
He moaned, seeing the desolation before them.
Groups of Seerkind, with a few of Hobart’s people scattered among them, stood in the valley and up the slopes of the surrounding hills, neither speaking nor moving. They were all that remained.
“What about Shadwell?” said Cal.
Suzanna shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “He escaped the Temple before me.”
The din of a revved car-engine canceled further conversation, as de Bono drove one of the invaders’ vehicles across the dead grass, bringing it to a halt a few feet from where Cal lay.
“I’ll drive,” said Suzanna, once Cal had been laid on the backseat.
“What do we tell the doctors?” Cal said, his voice getting fainter. “I’ve got a bullet in me.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Suzanna. As she got into the driver’s seat, which de Bono had only reluctantly vacated, somebody called her name. Nimrod was running toward the car.
“Where are you going?” he said to her.
She directed his attention to the passenger.
“My friend,” he said, seeing Cal, “you look the worse for wear.” He tried a smile of welcome, but tears came instead.
“It’s over,” he said, sobbing. “Destroyed. Our sweet land …” He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. “What do we do now?” he said to Suzanna.
“We get out of harm’s way,” she told him. “As quickly as we can. We still have enemies—”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “The Fugue’s gone. Everything we ever possessed, lost.”
“We’re alive, aren’t we?” she said. “As long as we’re alive …”
“Where will we go?”
“We’ll find a place.”
“You have to lead us now,” said Nimrod. “There’s only you.”
“Later. First, we have to help Cal—”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He’d taken hold of her arm, and was loath to let her go. “You will come back?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ll take the rest of them North,” he told her. “Two valleys from here. We’ll wait for you there.”
“Then move,” she sa
id. “Time’s wasting.”
“You will remember?” he said.
She would have laughed his doubts off, but that remembering was all. Instead she touched his wet face, letting him feel the menstruum in her fingers.
It was only as she drove away that she realized she’d probably blessed him.
From The Thief of Always
Hood didn’t waste any time. He’d no sooner made his final offer to Harvey than the balmy wind grew gusty, carrying off the lamb’s wool clouds that had been drifting through the summer sky. In their place came a juggernaut: a thunderhead the size of a mountain, which loomed over the House like a shadow thrown against Heaven.
It had more than lightning at its dark heart. It had the light rains that came at early morning to coax forth the seeds of another spring; it had the drooping fogs of autumn, and the spiraling snows that had brought so many midnight Christmases to the House. Now all three fell at once—rains, snows, and fogs—as a chilly sleet that all but covered the sun. It would have killed the flowers on the slope with cold, had the wind not reached them first, tearing through the blossoms with such vehemence that every petal and leaf was snatched up into the air.
Standing between this fragrant tide and the plummeting curtain of ice and cloud, Harvey was barely able to stay upright. But he planted his feet wide apart, and resisted every blast and buffet, determined not to take shelter. This spectacle might be the last he set eyes upon as a free spirit; indeed as a living spirit. He intended to enjoy it.
It was a sight to behold; a battle the likes of which the planet had never seen.
To his left, shafts of sunlight pierced the storm clouds in the name of Summer, only to be smothered by Autumn’s fogs, while to his right Spring coaxed its legions out of bough and earth, then saw its buds murdered by Winter’s frosts before they could show their colors.
Attack after attack was mounted and repulsed, reveille and retreat sounded a hundred times, but no one season was able to carry the day. It was soon impossible to distinguish defeats from victories. The rallies and the feints, the diversions and encirclements all became one confusion. Snows melted into rains as they fell; rains were boiled into vapor, and sweated new shoots out through the rot of their brothers.