The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  “He did mention it.”

  “And when that’s done. I’m sure he’ll embrace you as a brother.”

  “But until then—”

  “I have his permission to do whatever I must to keep you from being a Reconciler. And if that means driving you insane with memories—”

  “Then you will.”

  “Must, Maestro, must. I’m a dutiful creature.”

  Keep talking. Gentle thought, as it waxed poetic describing its powers of subservience. He wouldn’t make for the door, he’d decided. It was probably double- or treble-locked. Better that he went for the window by which he’d entered. He’d fling himself through if need be. If he broke a few bones in the process, it’d be a small price to pay for escape.

  He glanced around casually, as if deciding where he was going to lay his head, never once allowing his eves to stray to the front door. The room with the open window lay ten paces at most from where he stood. Once inside, there’d be another ten to reach the window. Little Ease, meanwhile, was lost in loops of its own humility. Now was as good a time as any.

  He took a pace toward the bottom of the stairs as a feint, then changed direction and darted for the door. He’d made three paces before it even realized what he was up to.

  “Don’t be so stupid!” it snapped.

  He’d been conservative in his calculation, he realized. He’d be through the door in eight paces, not ten, and across the room in another six.

  “I’m warning you,” it shrieked, then, realizing its appeals would gain it nothing, acted.

  Within a pace of the door, Gentle felt something open in his head. The crack through which he allowed the past to trickle suddenly gaped. In a pace the rivulet was a stream; in two, white waters: in three, a flood. He saw the window across the room, and the street outside, but his will to reach it was washed away in the deluge of the past.

  He’d lived nineteen lives between his years as Sartori and his time as John Furie Zacharias, his unconscious programmed by Pie to ease him out of one life and into another in a fog of self-ignorance that only lifted when the deed was done, and he awoke in a strange city, with a name filched from a telephone book or a conversation. He’d left pain behind him, of course, wherever he’d gone. Though he’d always been careful to detach himself from his circle, and cover his tracks when he departed, his sudden disappearances had undoubtedly caused great grief to everyone who’d held him in their affections. The only one who’d escaped unscathed had been himself. Until now. Now all these lives were upon him at once, and the hurts he’d scrupulously avoided caught up with him. His head filled with fragments of his past, pieces of the nineteen unfinished stories that he’d left behind, all lived with the same infantile greed for sensation that had marked his existence as John Furie Zacharias. In every one of these lives he’d had the comfort of adoration. He’d been loved and lionized: for his charm, for his profile, for his mystery. But that fact didn’t sweeten the flood of memories. Nor did it save him from the panic he felt as the little self he knew and understood was overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of details that arose from the other histories.

  For two centuries he’d never had to ask the questions that vexed every other soul at some midnight or other: ‘Who am I? What was I made for, and what will I be when I die?’

  Now he had too many answers, and that was more distressing than too few. He had a small tribe of selves, put on and off like masks. He had trivial purposes aplenty. But there had never been enough years held in his memory at one time to make him plumb the depths of regret or remorse, and he was the poorer for that. Nor, of course, had there been the imminence of death or the hard wisdom of mourning. Forgetfulness had always been on hand to smooth his frowns away, and it had left his spirit unproved.

  Just as he’d feared, the assault of sights and scenes was too much to bear, and though he fought to hold on to some sense of the man he’d been when he’d entered the house, it was rapidly subsumed. Halfway between the door and the window his desire to escape, which had been rooted in the need to protect himself, went out of him. The determination fell from his face, as though it were just another mask. Nothing replaced it. He stood in the middle of the room like a stoic sentinel, with no flicker of his inner turmoil rising to disturb the placid symmetry of his face.

  The night hours crawled on, marked by a bell in a distant steeple, but if he heard it he showed no sign. It wasn’t until the first light of day crept over Gamut Street, slipping through the window he’d been so desperate to reach, that the world outside his confounded head drew any response from him. He wept. Not for himself, but rather for the delicacy of this amber light falling in soft pools on the hard floor. Seeing it, he conceived the vague notion of stepping out into the street and looking for the source of this miracle, but there was somebody in his head, its voice stronger than the muck of confusion that swilled there, who wanted him to answer a question before it would allow him out to play. It was a simple enough inquiry.

  “Who are you?” it wanted to know.

  The answer was difficult. He had a lot of names in his head, and pieces of lives to go with them, but which one of them was his? He’d have to sort through many fragments to get a sense of himself, and that was too wretched a task on a day like this, when there were sunbeams at the window, inviting him out to spy their father in Heaven.

  “Who are you?” the voice asked him again, and he was obliged to tell the simple truth.

  “I don’t know.”

  The questioner seemed content with this. “You may as well go, then,” it said. “But I’d like you to come back once in a while, just to see me. Will you do that?”

  He said that of course he would, and the voice replied that he was free to go. His legs were stiff, and when he tried to walk he fell instead, and had to crawl to where the sun was brightening the boards. He played there for a time and then, feeling stronger, climbed out of the window into the street.

  Had he possessed a cogent memory of the previous night’s pursuits he’d have realized, as he jumped down onto the pavement, that his guess concerning Sartori’s agent had been correct, and its jurisdiction did indeed halt at the limits of the house. But he comprehended not at all the fact of his escape. He’d entered number 28 the previous night as a man of purpose, the Reconciler of the Imajica come to confront the past and be strengthened by self-knowledge. He left it undone by that same knowledge and stood in the street like a bedlamite, staring up at the sun in ignorance of the fact that its arc marked the year’s progression to midsummer, and thus to the hour when the man of purpose he’d been had to act—or fail forever.

  If coming to the moment of Reconciliation had been for Gentle a series of rememberings, leading him back to himself, then the greatest of those rememberings, and the one he was least prepared for, was the Reconciliation itself.

  Though he’d performed the working before, the circumstances had been radically different. For one, there’d been all the hoopla of a grand event. He’d gone into the circle like a prizefighter, with an air of congratulation hanging around his head before he’d even worked up a sweat, his patrons and admirers a cheering throng at the sidelines. This time he was alone. For another, he’d had his eyes on what the world would shower on him when the work was done: what women would fall to him, what wealth and glory would come. This time, the prize in sight was a different thing entirely, and wouldn’t be counted in stained sheets and coinage. He was the instrument of a higher and wiser power.

  That fact took the fear away. When he opened his mind to the process, he felt a calm come upon him, subduing the unease he’d felt climbing the stairs. He’d told Jude and Clem that forces would run through the house the likes of which its bricks had never known, and it was true. He felt them fuel his weakening mind, ushering his thoughts out of his head to gather the Dominion to the circle.

  That gleaning began with the place he was sitting in. His mind spread to all compass points, and up and down, to have the sum of the room. It was an easy spac
e to grasp. Generations of prison poets had made the analogies for him, and he borrowed them freely. The walls were his body’s limits, the door his mouth, the windows his eyes: commonplace similitudes, taxing his power of comparison not a jot. He dissolved the boards, the plaster, the glass, and all the thousand tiny details in the same lyric of confinement and, having made them part of him, broke their bounds to stray farther afield.

  As his imagination headed down the stairs and up onto the roof, he felt the beginnings of momentum. His intellect, dogged by literalism, was already lagging behind a sensibility more mercurial, which was delivering back to him similitudes for the whole house before his logical faculties had even reached the hallway.

  Once again, his body was the measure of all things: the cellar, his bowels; the roof, his scalp; the stairs, his spine. Their proofs delivered, his thoughts flew out of the house, rising up over the slates and spreading through the streets. He gave passing consideration to Sartori as he went, knowing his other was out here in the night somewhere, skulking. But his mind was quicksilver, and too exhilarated by its speed and capacity to go searching in the shadows for an enemy already defeated.

  With speed came ease. The streets were no more difficult to claim than the house he’d already devoured. His body had its conduits and its intersections, had its places of excrement and its fine, dandified façades; had its rivers, moving from a springing place, and its parliament, and its holy seat.

  The whole city, he began to see, could be analogized to his flesh, bone, and blood. And why should that be so surprising? When an architect turned his mind to the building of a city, where would he look for inspiration? To the flesh where he’d lived since birth. It was the first model for any creator. It was a school and an eating house and an abattoir and a church; it could be a prison and a brothel and bedlam. There wasn’t an edifice in any street in London that hadn’t begun somewhere in the private city of an architect’s anatomy, and all Gentle had to do was open his mind to that fact and the districts were his, running back to swell the assembly in his head.

  He flew north, through Highbury and Finsbury Park, to Palmer’s Green and Coekfosters. He went east with the river, past Greenwich, where the clock that marked the coming of midnight stood, and on toward Tilbury. West took him through Marylebone and Hammersmith, south through Lambeth and Streatham, where he’d first met Pie ‘oh’ pah, long ago.

  But the names soon became irrelevant. Like the ground seen from a rising plane, the particulars of a street or a district became part of another pattern, even more appetizing to his ambitious spirit. He saw the Wash glittering to the east, and the Channel to the south, becalmed on this humid night. Here was a fine new challenge. Was his body, which had proved the equal of a city, also the measure of this vaster geography? Why not? Water flowed by the same laws everywhere, whether the conduit was a groove in his brow or a rift between the continents. And were his hands not like two countries, laid side by side in his lap, their peninsulas almost touching, their landscapes scarred and grooved?

  There was nothing outside his substance that was not mirrored within: no sea, no city, no street, no roof, no room. He was in the Fifth, and the Fifth in him, gathering to be carried into the Ana as a proof and a map and a poem, written in praise of all things being One.

  From Weaveworld

  The third week of September brought rain. Not the torrents of August, which had poured from operatic skies, but drizzles and piddlings. The days grew grayer; and so, it seemed, did Brendan. Though Cal made daily attempts to persuade his father downstairs, he would no longer come. Cal also made two or three valiant efforts to talk about what had happened a month before, but the old man was simply not interested. His eyes became glazed as soon as he sensed the drift of the conversation, and if Cal persisted he grew irritable.

  The professionals judged that Brendan was suffering from senile dementia, an irreversible process which would finally make him impossible for Cal to nurse. It might be best for all concerned, they advised, if a place were found in a nursing home, where Brendan could be cared for twenty-four hours a day.

  Cal rejected the suggestion. He was certain that Brendan’s cleaving to a room he knew—one he’d shared with Eileen for so many years—was all that was keeping him from total breakdown.

  He was not alone in his attempts to nurse his father. Two days after he’d failed to set the pigeons flying, Geraldine had appeared at the house. There was ten minutes of hesitant apologies and explanations, then Brendan’s condition entered the exchange and Geraldine’s good sense came triumphantly to the fore. Forget our differences, she said, I want to help. Cal was not about to refuse the offer. Brendan responded to Geraldine’s presence as a child to a long-lost teat. He was cosseted and indulged, and with Geraldine in the house in Eileen’s place, Cal found himself falling back into the old domestic routines. The affection he felt for Geraldine was painless, which was surely the most certain sign of how slight it was. When she was there he was happy to be with her. But he seldom, if ever, missed her.

  As to the Fugue, he did his best to keep his memories of it sharp, but it was by no means easy. The Kingdom had ways to induce forgetfulness so subtle and so numerous he was scarcely aware of how they dulled him.

  It was only when, in the middle of a dreary day, something reminded him—a scent, a shout—that he had once been in another place, and breathed its air and met its creatures, it was only then that he realized how tentative his recall was. And the more he went in pursuit of what he was forgetting the more it eluded him.

  The glories of the Fugue were becoming mere words, the reality of which he could no longer conjure. When he thought of an orchard it was less and less that extraordinary place he’d slept in (slept, and dreamed that this life he was now living was the dream) and more a commonplace stand of apple trees.

  The miracles were drifting from him, and he seemed to be unable to hold on to them.

  Surely dying was like this, he thought; losing things dear and unable to prevent their passing.

  Yes; this was a kind of dying.

  Brendan, for his part, continued to continue. As the weeks passed, Geraldine managed to talk him into joining them downstairs, but he was interested in little but tea and television, and his conversation was now scarcely more than grunts. Sometimes Cal would watch Brendan’s face as he sat slumped in front of the television—his expression unchanging whether the screen offered pundits or comedians—and wondered what had happened to the man he’d known. Was the old Brendan still in hiding somewhere, behind those addled eyes, or had he been an illusion all along, a son’s dream of his father’s permanence which, like the letter from Eileen, had simply evaporated? Perhaps it was for the best, he thought, that Brendan was shielded from his pain, then drew himself up short at such a thought. Wasn’t that what they said as the coffin was marched past: it was all for the best? Brendan wasn’t dead yet.

  As time went by, Geraldine’s presence began to prove as comforting to Cal as to the old man. Her smiles were the brightest thing those dismal months could boast. She came and went, more indispensable by the day, until, in the first week of December, she suggested it might be more convenient all round if she slept at the house. It was a perfectly natural progression.

  “I don’t want to marry you,” she told him quite plainly. The sorry spectacle of Theresa’s marriage—five months old and already rocky—had confirmed her worst suspicions of matrimony. “I did want to marry you once,” she said. “But now I’m happy just to be with you.”

  She proved easy company; down-to-earth, unsentimental: as much companion as lover. She it was who made certain the bills were paid on time, and saw that there was tea in the caddy. She it was too who suggested that Cal sell the pigeons.

  “Your father doesn’t show any interest in them any longer,” she said on more than one occasion. “He wouldn’t even notice if they were gone.”

  That was certainly true. But Cal refused to contemplate the sale. Come spring and the fine weather
his father might well show fresh interest in the birds.

  “You know that’s not true,” she’d tell him when he put this point. “Why do you want to keep them so much? They’re just a burden.” Then she’d let the subject drop for a few days, only to raise it again when a cue was presented.

  History was repeating itself. Often in the course of these exchanges, which gradually became more heated, Cal could hear echoes of his mother and father: the same routes were being trodden afresh. And, like his father, Cal—though malleable on almost every other issue—was immovable on this. He would not sell the birds.

  The real reason for his bullishness was not, of course, hope of Brendan’s rehabilitation, but the fact that the birds were his last concrete link with the events of the previous summer.

  In the weeks after Suzanna’s disappearance he’d bought a dozen newspapers a day, scanning each page for some report of her, or the carpet, or Shadwell. But there was nothing, and eventually—unable to bear the daily disappointment—he’d stopped looking. Nor was there any further visit from Hobart or his men—which was in its way bad news. He, Cal, had become an irrelevancy. The story, if it was still being written, was running on without him.

  He became so frightened he’d forget the Fugue that he took the risk of writing down all that he could remember of the night there, which, when he set himself to the task, was depressingly little. He wrote the names down too: Lemuel Lo; Apolline Dubois; Frederick Cammell …; set them all down at the back of his diary, in the section reserved for telephone numbers, except that there were no numbers for these people; nor addresses either. Just uncommon names to which he was less and less able to attach faces.

  On some nights he had dreams, from which he would wake with tears on his face.

  Geraldine consoled him as best she could, given that he claimed not to recall these dreams when he woke. That was in a sense true. He brought nothing into consciousness that words could encapsulate: only an aching sadness. She would lie beside him then, and stroke his hair, and tell him that though these were difficult times things could be much worse. She was right, of course. And by and by the dreams dwindled, until they finally ceased altogether.