by Clive Barker
And somewhere in the midst of this chaos, the power that had brought it about raised its voice in a rage, demanding that it cease.
“Enough!” the Hood-House veiled. “Enough!”
But its voice—which had once carried such terrible authority—had grown weak. Its orders went unnoticed; or if noticed, then disobeyed.
The seasons raged on, throwing themselves against each other with rare abandon, and in passing tearing at the House which stood in the midst of their battlefield.
The walls, which had begun to teeter as Hood’s power diminished, were thrown over by the raging wind. The chimneys were wracked by thunder, and toppled; the lightning rods struck so many times they melted, and fell through the slateless roof in a burning rain, setting fire to every floorboard, banister, and stick of furniture they touched. The porch, pummeled by hail, was reduced to matchwood. The staircase, rocked to its foundations by the growth in the dirt around it, collapsed like a tower of cards.
Squinting against the face of the storm, Harvey witnessed all of this, and rejoiced. He’d come to the House hoping to steal back the years that Hood had tricked from him, but he’d never dared believe he could bring the whole edifice down. Yet here it was, falling as he watched. Loud though the dins of wind and thunder were, they couldn’t drown out the sound of the House as it perished and went to dust. Every nail and sill and brick seemed to shriek at once, a cry of pain that only oblivion could comfort.
Harvey was denied a glimpse of Hood’s last moments. A cloud of dirt rose like a veil to cover the sight. But he knew the moment his battle with the Vampire King was over, because the warring seasons suddenly turned to peace. The thunderhead softened its furies, and dispersed; the wind dropped to an idling breeze; the fierce sun grew watery, and veiled itself in mist.
There was debris in the air, of course: petals and leaves, dust and ash. They fell like a dream rain, though their fall marked the end of a dream.
“Oh, child …,” said Mrs. Griffin.
Harvey turned to her. She was standing just a few yards from him, gazing up at the sky. There was a little patch of blue above their heads; the first glimpse of real sky these few acres of ground had seen since Hood had founded his empire of illusions. But it was not the patch she was watching, it was a congregation of floating lights—the same that Harvey had seen Hood feeding upon in the attic—which had been freed by the collapse of the House. They were now moving in a steady stream toward the lake.
“The children’s souls,” she said, her voice growing thinner as she spoke the word. “Beautiful.”
Her body was no longer solid, Harvey saw; she was fading away in front of him.
“Oh no,” he murmured.
She took her eyes off the sky and stared down at her arms, and the cat she was carrying in them. It too was growing insubstantial.
“Look at us,” Mrs. Griffin said, with a smile upon her weary face. “It feels so wonderful.”
“But you’re disappearing.”
“I’ve lingered here far too long, sweet boy,” she said. There were tears glistening on her face, but they were tears of joy, not of sadness. “It’s time to go …” She kept stroking Stew-Cat as they both faded from sight. “You are the brightest soul I ever met, Harvey Swick,” she said. “Keep shining, won’t you?”
Harvey wished he had some words to persuade her to stay a little while longer. But even if he’d had such words, he knew it would have been selfish to speak them. Mrs. Griffin had another life to go to, where every soul shone.
“Good-bye, child,” she said. “Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.”
Then her ghostly form flickered out, leaving Harvey alone in the ruins.
From Sacrament
Halfway along the track that led from the crossroads to the Courthouse, Will heard the squeaking of ill-oiled wheels behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see not one but two bicycle headlamps a little distance behind him. Breathing an inventive little curse, he stood and waited until Frannie and Sherwood caught up with him.
“Go home,” were his first words to them.
“No,” said Frannie breathlessly. “We decided to come with you.”
“I don’t want you to come,” Will said.
“It’s a free country,” Sherwood replied. “We can go wherever we want. Can’t we, Frannie?”
“Shut up,” Frannie said. Then to Will: “I only wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“So why’d you bring him?” Will said.
“Because … he asked me …,” Frannie said. “He won’t be a bother.”
Will shook his head. “I don’t want you coming inside,” he said.
“It’s a free—” Sherwood began again, but Frannie shushed him.
“All right, we won’t,” she said. “We’ll just wait.”
Knowing this was the best deal he was going to be able to make, Will headed for the Courthouse, with Frannie and Sherwood trailing behind. He made no further recognition of their presence, until he got to the hedgerow adjacent to the Courthouse. Only then did he turn and tell them in a whisper that if they made a sound they’d spoil everything and he would never ever speak to them again. With the warning given, he dug through the hawthorn and started up the gently sloping meadow toward the building. It loomed larger by night than it had by day, like a vast mausoleum, but he could see a light flickering within; there was nothing but exhilaration in his heart as he made his way down the passage toward it.
Jacob was sitting in the judge’s chair, with a small fire burning on the table in front of him. He looked up when he heard the door creak, and by the flames’ light Will had sight of the face he had conjured so many ways. In every detail, he had fallen short of its power. He had not made a brow wide or clear enough, nor eyes deep enough, nor imagined that Steep’s hair, which he had seen in silhouette falling in curly abundance, would be cropped back to a shadow on the top of his skull. He had not imagined the gloss of his beard and mustache, or the delicacy of his lips, which he licked, and licked again, before saying:
“Welcome, Will. You come at a strange time.”
“Does that mean you want me to go?”
“No. Far from it.” He added a few pieces of tinder to the fire before him. It crackled and spat. “It is, I know, the custom to paint a smile over sorrow; to pretend there is joy in you when there is not. But I hate wiles and pretenses. The truth is I’m melancholy tonight.”
“What’s … melancholy?” Will said.
“There’s honest,” Jacob replied appreciatively. “Melancholy is sad, but more than sad. It’s what we feel when we think about the world and how little we understand; when we think of what we must come to.”
“You mean dying and stuff?”
“Dying will do,” Jacob said. “Though that’s not what concerns me tonight.” He beckoned to Will. “Come closer,” he said, “it’s warmer by the fire.”
The few flames on the table offered, Will thought, little prospect of heat, but he gladly approached. “So why are you sad?” Will said.
Jacob sat back in the ancient chair, and contemplated the fire. “It’s business between a man and a woman,” he replied. “You need not concern yourself with it for a little time yet and you should be grateful. Hold it off as long as you can.” As he spoke he reached into his pocket and pulled out more fuel for his tiny bonfire. This time, Will was close enough to see that this tinder was moving. Fascinated, and faintly sickened, Will approached the table, and saw that Steep’s captive was a moth, the wings of which he had caught between thumb and forefinger. Its legs and antennae flailed as it was dropped into the flames, and for an instant it seemed the draught of heat would waft it to safety, but before it could gain sufficient height its wings ignited and down it went. “Living and dying we feed the fire,” Steep said softly. “That is the melancholy truth of things.”
“Except that you just did the feeding,” Will said, surprised by his own eloquence.
“So we must,” Jacob replied. “Or th
ere’d be darkness in here. And how would we see each other then? I daresay you’d be more comfortable with fuel that didn’t squirm as you fed it to the flame.”
“Yes …,” Will said, “I would.”
“Do you eat sausages, Will?”
“Yes.”
“You like them, I’m sure. A nicely browned pork sausage? Or a good steak and kidney pie?”
“Yes. I like steak and kidney pie.”
“But do you think of the beast, shitting itself in terror as it is shunted to its execution? Hanging by one leg, still kicking, while the blood spurts from its neck? Do you?”
Will had heard his father debate often enough to know that there was a trap here. “It’s not the same,” he protested.
“Oh, but it is.”
“No, it’s not. I need food to stay alive.”
“So eat turnips.”
“But I like sausages.”
“You like light too, Will.”
“There are candles,” Will said, “right there.”
“And the living earth gave up wax and wick in their making,” Steep said. “Everything is consumed, Will, sooner or later. Living and dying we feed the fire.” He smiled, just a little. “Sit,” he said softly. “Go on. We’re equals here. Both a little melancholy.”
Will sat. “I’m not melancholy,” he said, liking the gift of the word. “I’m happy.”
“Are you really? Well that’s good to hear. And why are you so happy?”
Will was embarrassed to admit the truth, but Jacob had been honest, he thought; so should he. “Because I found you here,” he said.
“That pleases you?”
“Yes.”
“But in an hour you’ll be bored with me—”
“No, I won’t.”
“And the sadness will still be there, waiting for you.” As he spoke, the fire began to dwindle. “Do you want to feed the fire, Will?” Steep said.
His words carried an uncanny power. It was as though this dwindling meant more than the extinguishing of a few flames. This fire was suddenly the only light in a cold, sunless world, and if somebody didn’t feed it soon the consequences would be grim.
“Well, Will?” Jacob said, digging in his pocket and taking out another moth. “Here,” he said, proffering it.
Will hesitated. He could hear the soft flapping of the moth’s panic. He looked past the creature to its captor. Jacob’s face was utterly without expression.
“Well?” Jacob said.
The fire had almost gone out. Another few seconds and it would be too late. The room would be given over to darkness, and the face in front of Will, its symmetry and its scrutiny, would be gone.
That thought was suddenly too much to bear. Will looked back at the moth: at its wheeling legs and its flapping antennae. Then, in a kind of wonderful terror, he took it from Jacob’s fingers.
From Sacrament
It had always been Steep’s preference, when he was about the business of slaughtering mating couples, to kill the male first. If he was dealing with the last of a species, of course—which was his great and glorious labor—the dispatch of both genders was academic. All he needed to do was kill one to ensure that the line was ended. But he liked to be able to kill both, for neatness’ sake, starting with the male. He had a number of practical reasons for this. In most species the male was the more aggressive of the sexes, and for his own protection it made sense to incapacitate the husband before the wife. He’d also observed that females were more likely to demonstrate grief at the demise of their mates, in the throes of which they could be readily killed. The male, by contrast, became vengeful. All but two of the serious injuries he’d sustained over the years had come from males that he had unwisely left to kill after the female and that had thrown themselves upon him with suicidal abandon. A century and a half since the extinction of the great auk on the cliffs of St. Kilda, and he still bore the scar on his forearm where the male had opened him up. And in cold weather there was still an ache in his thigh where a blaubok had kicked him, seeing its lady bleeding to death before its eyes.
Both were painful lessons. But more painful than either the scars or the ill-knit bones was the memory of those males who had, through some failing of his, outmaneuvered him and escaped. It had happened seldom, but when it had he had mounted heroic searches for the escapee, driving Rosa to distraction with his doggedness. Let the brute go, she’d tell him, ever the pragmatist; just let him die of loneliness.
Oh, but that was what haunted him. The thought of a rogue animal out in the wild, circling its territory, looking for something that was its like, and coming back at last to the place where its mate had perished, seeking a vestige of her being—a scent, a feather, a shard of bone—was almost unbearable. He had caught fugitives several times under such circumstances; waiting for them to return to that fatal place, and murdering them on the spot where they mourned. But there were some animals that escaped him completely, whose final hours were not his to have dominion over, and these were a source of great distress to him. He dreamed and imagined them for months after. Saw them wandering in his mind’s eye; growing ragged, growing rogue. And then, when a season or two had passed, and they had not encountered any of their own species, losing the will to live; flea-bitten and bony-shanked, becoming phantoms of veldt or forest or ice floe, until they finally gave up all hope, and died.
He would always know when this finally happened; or such was his conviction. He would feel the animal’s passing in his gut, as though a physical procedure as real as digestion had come to its inevitable end. Another dinning thing had gone into memory (and into his journal) never to be known again.
This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this …
TWELVE
MEMORY
I probably have more life to remember than I do to live. That calculation would once have made me clammy; now there’s something almost comforting in it. Plenty still to do, plenty still to experience; but plenty, too, accumulated. Plenty stored where circumstance cannot spoil it.
In some measure my books are a repository of memories: of friends, places, insights, feelings. And several of the novels use the theme of memory, and forgetfulness, as a narrative element. The Nilotic, in Sacrament, has forgotten its own identity. Cal Mooney, in Weaveworld, is induced into a dreamy forgetfulness of miracles by the world in which he lives. In Imajica, the memory loss is self-induced, the consequence of a character having felt too much grief and failure.
The memories which that character, a man called Gentle, is repressing, come back to him in a sequence I’ve chosen for this chapter. His confrontation isn’t just a reclamation of who he was, but of who he is. The man who is remembering must take the responsibility for what he remembers.
From Sacrament
As the afternoon light began to fail, the wind veered, and came out of the northeast across Hudson Bay, rattling the door and windows of Guthrie’s shack, like something lonely and invisible, wanting comfort at the table. The old man sat in his old leather armchair and savored the gale’s din like a connoisseur. He had long ago given up on the charms of the human voice. It was more often than not a courier of lies and confusions, or so he had come to believe; if he never heard another syllable uttered in his life he would not think himself the poorer. All he needed byway of communication was the sound he was listening to now. The wind’s mourn and whine was wiser than any psalm, prayer or profession of love he’d ever heard.
But tonight the sound failed to soothe him as it usually did. He knew why. The responsibility lay with the visitor who’d come knocking on his door the night before. He’d disturbed Guthrie’s equilibrium, raising the phantoms of faces he’d tried so hard to put from his mind. Jacob Steep, with his soot-and-gold eyes, and black beard, and pale poet’s hands; and Rosa, glorious Rosa, who had the gold of Steep’s eyes in her hair, and the black of his beard in her gaze, but was as fleshy and passionate as he was sweatless and unmoved. Guthrie had known them for such a short time, and many years a
go, but he had them in his mind’s eye so clearly he might have met them that morning.
He had Rabjohns there too: with his green milk eyes, too gentle by half, and his hair in unruly abundance, curling at his nape, and the wide ease of his face, nicked with scars on his cheek and brow. He hadn’t been scarred half enough, Guthrie thought; there was still some measure of hope in him. Why else had he come asking questions, except in the belief that they could be answered? He’d learn, if he lived long enough. There were no answers. None that made sense anyhow.
The wind gusted hard against the window, and loosened one of the boards Guthrie had taped over a cracked pane. He raised himself out of the pit of his chair and, picking up the roll of tape he’d used to secure the board, crossed to the window to fix it. Before he stuck it back in place, blocking out the world, he stared through the grimy glass. The day was close to departure, the thickening waters of the Bay the color of slate, the rocks black. He kept staring, distracted from his task not by the sight but by the memories which came to him still, unbidden, unwanted, but impossible to put from his head.
Words first. No more than a murmur. But that was all he needed.
These will not come again —
Steep was speaking, his voice majestic.
— nor this. Nor this —
And as he spoke the pages appeared in front of Guthrie’s grieving eyes; the pages of Steep’s terrible book. There, a perfect rendering of a bird’s wing, exquisitely colored —
—nor this—
And here, on the following page, a beetle, copied in death; every part documented for posterity: mandible, wing-case, and segmented limb.
— nor this —
“Jesus,” he sobbed, the roll of tape dropping from his trembling fingers. Why couldn’t Rabjohns have left him alone? Was there no corner of the world where a man might listen to the wail of the wind, without being discovered and reminded of his crimes?