The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  “Good likeness, huh?” Ted said.

  Harry assumed it was, given that he’d been recognized from it, but hell, it was less than comforting. He had good bones—Norma had told him so the first time she’d touched his face—but did they have to protrude quite so much? The way Ted had laid the paint down on Harry’s face he’d practically carved the features: long nose, strong jaw, wide brow, and all. As for the marks of age, he hadn’t stinted. The gray hairs and the frown lines were much in evidence. It wasn’t a bad face to be wearing into his forties, Harry supposed. Sure, there was none of the serenity that was rumored to be compensation for losing the bloom and ease of youth—his stare was troubled, the smile on his lips tentative to say the least—but it was a picture of a sane man with all his limbs and faculties intact, and of the people who’d wrestled with the beasts of the abyss, that pretty much put Harry in a league of one.

  “Do you see it?” Ted said.

  “See what?”

  Ted brought Harry a couple of steps closer to the canvas and pointed to the lower half.

  “There.” Harry looked. First at the sidewalk, then at the gutter. “Under “your foot,” Ted prompted.

  There, squirming under Harry’s right heel, was a thin black snake, with burning coals for eyes.

  “The Devil Himself,” Ted said.

  “Got him where I want him, have I?” Harry said.

  Ted grinned. “Hey, it’s art. I’m allowed to lie a little.”

  From Sacrament

  Clem’s duties were done for the night. He’d been out since seven the previous evening, about the same business that took him out every night: the shepherding of those among the city’s homeless too frail or too young to survive long on its streets with only concrete and cardboard for a bed. Midsummer Night was only two days away, and the hours of darkness were short and relatively balmy, but there were other stalkers besides the cold that preyed on the weak—all human—and the work of denying them their quarry took him through the empty hours after midnight and left him, as now, exhausted, but too full of feeling to lay down his head and sleep. He’d seen more human misery in the three months he’d been working with the homeless than in the four decades preceding that. People living in the extremes of deprivation within spitting distance of the city’s most conspicuous symbols of justice, faith, and democracy: without money, without hope, and many (these the saddest) without much left of their sanity. When he returned home after these nightly treks, the hole left in him by Taylor’s passing not filled but at least forgotten for a while, it was with expressions of such despair in his head that his own, met in the mirror, seemed almost blithe.

  Tonight, however, he lingered in the dark city longer than usual. Once the sun was up he knew he’d have little or no chance of sleeping, but sleep was of little consequence to him at the moment. It was two days since he’d had the visitation that had sent him to Judy’s doorstep with tales of angels, and since then there’d been no further hint of Taylor’s presence. But there were other hints, not in the house but out here in the streets, that powers were abroad which his dear Taylor was just one sweet part of.

  He’d had evidence of this only a short time ago. Just after midnight a man called Tolland, apparently much feared among the fragile communities that gathered to sleep under the bridges and in the stations of Westminster, had gone on a rampage in Soho. He’d wounded two alcoholics in a back street, their sole offense to be in his path when his temper flowed. Clem had witnessed none of this, but had arrived after Tolland’s arrest to see if he could coax from the gutter some of those whose beds and belongings had been demolished. None would go with him, however, and in the course of his vain persuasions one of the number, a woman he’d never seen without tears on her face until now, had smiled at him and said he should stay out in the open with them tonight rather than hiding in his bed, because the Lord was coming, and it would be the people on the streets who saw Him first. Had it not been for Taylor’s fleeting reappearance in his life, Clem would have dismissed the woman’s blissful talk, but there were too many imponderables in the air for him to ignore the vaguest signpost to the miraculous. He’d asked the woman what Lord this was that was coming, and she’d replied, quite sensibly, that it didn’t matter. Why should she care what Lord it was, she said, as long as He came?

  Now it was an hour before dawn, and he was trudging across Waterloo Bridge because he’d heard the psychopathic Tolland had usually kept to the South Bank and something odd must have happened to drive him across the river. A faint clue, to be sure, but enough to keep Clem walking, though hearth and pillow lay in the opposite direction.

  The concrete bunkers of the South Bank complex had been a favorite bête grise of Taylor’s, their ugliness railed against whenever the subject of contemporary architecture came up in conversation. The darkness presently concealed their drab, stained façades, but it also turned the maze of underpasses and walkways around them into terrain no bourgeois would tread for fear of his life or his wallet. Recent experience had taught Clem to ignore such anxieties. Warrens such as this usually contained individuals more aggressed against than aggressive, souls whose shouts were a defense against imagined enemies and whose tirades, however terrifying they might seem emerging from shadow, usually dwindled into tears.

  In fact, he’d not heard a whisper from the murk as he descended from the bridge. The cardboard city was visible where its suburbs spilled out into the meager lamplight, but the bulk of it lay under cover of the walkways, out of sight and utterly quiet. He began to suspect that the lunatic Tolland was not the only tenant who’d left his plot to travel north and, stooping to peer into the boxes on the outskirts, had that suspicion confirmed. He headed into shadow, fishing his pencil torch from his pocket to light the way. There was the usual detritus on the ground: spoiled scraps of food, broken bottles, vomit stains. But the boxes, and the beds of newspaper and filthy blankets they contained, were empty. More curious than ever, he wandered on through the rubbish, hoping to find a soul here too weak or too crazy to leave, who could explain this migration. But he passed through the city without finding a single occupant, emerging into what the planners of this concrete hell had designed as a children’s playground. All that remained of their good intentions were the grimy bones of a slide and a jungle gym. The paving beyond them, however, was covered in fresh color, and advancing to the spot Clem found himself in the middle of a kitsch exhibition: crude chalk copies of movie-star portraits and glamour girls everywhere underfoot.

  He ran the beam over the ground, following the trail of images. It led him to a wall, which was also decorated, but by a very different hand. Here was no mere copyist’s work. This image was on such a grand scale Clem had to play his torch beam back and forth across it to grasp its splendor. A group of philanthropic muralists had apparently taken it upon themselves to enliven this underworld, and the result was a dream landscape, its sky green, with streaks of brilliant yellow, the plain beneath orange and red. Set on the sands, a walled city, with fantastical spires.

  The torch beam caught a glint off the paint, and Clem approached the wall to discover that the muralists had only recently left off their labors. Patches of the paint were still tacky. Seen at close quarters, the rendering was extremely casual, almost slapdash. Barely more than half a dozen marks had been used to indicate the city and its towers, and only a single snaking stroke to show the highway running from the gates. Moving his beam off the picture to illuminate the way ahead, Clem realized why the muralists had been so haphazard. They had been at work on every available wall, creating a parade of brightly colored images, many of which were far stranger than the landscape with the green sky. To Clem’s left was a man with two cupped hands for a head, lightning jumping between the palms; to his right a family of freaks, with fur on their faces. Farther on was an alpine scene, fantasticated by the addition of several naked women, hovering above the snows; beyond it a skull-strewn veldt, with a distant train belching smoke against a dazzling sky; and beyond
that again, an island set in the middle of a sea disturbed by a single wave, in the foam of which a face could be discovered. All were painted with the same passionate haste as the first, which fact lent them the urgency of sketches and added to their power. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, or simply the bizarre setting for this exhibition, but Clem found himself oddly moved by the images. There was nothing ingratiating or sentimental about them. They were glimpses into the minds of strangers, and he was exhilarated to find such wonders there.

  From Weaveworld

  Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

  The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

  Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.

  Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden among them is a filigree which will with time become a world.

  APPENDIX

  THE BOOKS OF BLOOD

  First published in 1984 and 1985

  Written originally for the entertainment of his friends, The Books of Blood were published in six volumes over a period of two years. Their powerful and provocative content earned a word of mouth reputation that made Clive Barker a household name. The Books of Blood won the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection.

  Volume I: “The Book of Blood”; “The Midnight Meat Train”; “The Yattering and Jack”; “Pig Blood Blues”; “Sex, Death and Starshine”; “In the Hills, the Cities.”

  Volume II: “Dread”; “Hell’s Event”; “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”; “The Skins of the Fathers”; “New Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

  Volume III: “Son of Celluloid”; “Rawhead Rex”; “Confession of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”; “Scapegoats”; “Human Remains.”

  Volume IV: “The Body Politic”; “The Inhuman Condition”; “Revelations”; “Down, Satan!”; “The Age of Desire.”

  Volume V: “The Forbidden”; “The Madonna”; “Babel’s Children”; “In the Flesh.”

  Volume VI: “The Life of Death”; “How Spoilers Bleed”; “Twilight at the Towers”; “The Last Illusion”; “The Book of Blood (a postscript): On Jerusalem Street.”

  “Clive Barker completes a sextet of imaginative forays into the grandest of guignol.”

  —Time Out

  THE DAMNATION GAME

  First published in 1 985

  Barker’s debut novel, published between Volumes III and IV of The Books of Blood, is a modern reworking of the Faustian myth. A London criminal, Marty Strauss, is sprung from prison to act as bodyguard to Joseph Whitehead, a millionaire industrialist and former gambler who owes his empire to Mamoulian, who sacrificed his soul in return for terrifying powers. As Marty learns the disturbing truth about just who he is protecting his employer from, the narrative takes the reader through a variety of striking landscapes: from the blasted streets of postwar Warsaw to the gaming clubs and back alleys of modern-day London; from vast country estates and impenetrable fortresses to a nightworld filled with ghostly assassins.

  “Wonderful, moving and apocalyptic. Death and damnation hang at the end of every chapter.”

  —Seattle Post

  WEAVEWORLD

  First published in 1987

  Cal Mooney is drawn into a world of mystery and revelation when he first sees an old carpet in the back yard of Mimi Laschenski’s house. When Mimi dies her grand-daughter, Suzanna, becomes the custodian of the carpet; but she and Cal soon find themselves hunted by the witch Immacolata and her accomplice, the salesman Shadwell. The carpet contains the last refuge of the Seerkind, a magical tribe cast out of Eden, and the Immacolata and Shadwell are ready to sell the exotic refugees into slavery. Only Cal and Suzanna stand in their way. Weaveworld redefined the parameters of genre fiction, creating a vast epic narrative played out against the dual backdrops of a bleak, industrialized Liverpool and the strange, fantastic landscape of the Fugue, a magical world hidden within the ancient carpet.

  “His most ambitious and imaginative work … strands of Joyce, Poe, Tolkien … an irresistible yarn.”

  —Time

  “An epic tale of a magic carpet and the wondrous world within its weave [that] towers above his earlier work … the most ambitious and visionary horror novel of the decade … a raging flood of image and situation so rich as to overflow. Barker has unleashed literary genius.”

  —Kirkus

  THE HELLBOUND HEART

  First published in 1987

  Frank becomes obsessed with trying to open a Chinese puzzle-box, but the eventual solution opens a doorway into Hell, and through it come the Cenobites, demons who have dedicated an eternity to the pursuit of pleasure-and pain. This is the novella which inspired the groundbreaking horror film classic, Hellraiser.

  “A real marrow-melter.”

  —The Scotsman

  CABAL

  First published in 1989

  Aaron Boone, a psychiatric patient suffering from disturbing dreams of a place called Midian, finds himself accused of a series of mass murders. On the run, he learns from a fellow patient that Midian does indeed exist. Boone is killed trying to get there but returns from the dead, knowing that his journey is not yet over. Expanded from a novella which first appeared in the U.S. edition of The Books of Blood, Volume VI, Cabal was made into the film, Nightbreed, and directed by Barker himself.

  “A complete but open-ended system of multi-layered dark magic. On the one hand it’s a simple macabre tale; on the other it shows a deep and dreadful understanding of society and its outcasts … a rare, powerful fantasy.”

  —Fear

  THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

  First published in 1989

  The First Book of The Art. Two men’s obsession with gaining access to Quiddity, the dream sea that separates us from the nightmare world of the Iad Uroboros, leads screenwriter Tesla Bombeck into a conflict which leaves her transformed into a powerful shaman. This obsession also sets in motion a chain of events which lead to a destructive battle in Palomo Grove, as both men gather armies from the souls of the quiet Californian town. And as a schism is opened into Quiddity, the terrifying Iad Uroboros approach the opening, intent on invading our world.

  “Clive Barker’s career has been building up to The Great and Secret Show. It is nothing so much as a cross between Gravity’s Rainbow and The Lord of the Rings; allusive and mythic, complex and entertaining … extravagantly metaphorical, wildly symbolic, skillful and funny.” —New York Times Book Review

  IMAJICA

  First published in 1991

  The Imajica — five Dominions, four reconciled. The fifth, Earth, is cut off from the others, its people living in ignorance of the surrounding wonder. But a time of Reconciliation is approaching, and this represents both opportunity and threat to all the peoples of the Imajica. Three very different people bound by one secret – Gentle, a master forger; Judith, a beautiful independent woman; and Pie’oh’ Pah, an assassin – all seeking a deeper understanding to their lives, are brought together in a deadly quest for Reconciliation as they journey through the fantastic, exotic worlds of the Imajica.

  “Tears and blood and nightmare imagery are passionate and ingenious. Imajica is a ride with remarkable views.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “Rich in plot twists, Byzantine intrigues, and hidden secrets, Imajica is a Chinese puzzle book constructed on a universal scale … Barker has an unparalleled talent for envisioning other worlds.”

  —Washington Post

  THE THIEF OF ALWAYS

  First published in 1992

  Mr. Hood’s Holiday House has stood for a thousand
years, a place of miracles offering everything a child could wish for. But when young Harvey Swick discovers its darker secrets he finds himself trapped inside, and must battle the sinister Mr. Hood in a bid for freedom. This fable for all ages, richly illustrated in black and white by the author, represented a change of style which was critically acclaimed the world over.

  “A dashingly produced fantasy with powerful drawings by the author.”

  —Daily Telegraph

  “Barker’s book puts the grim back into fairy tales and continues a noble tradition of scaring kids witless. Neatly nasty drawings too.”

  —Time Out

  EVERVILLE

  First published in 1994

  The Second Book of the Art. A door stands open on a mountain high above the city of Everville, revealing the shores of the dream sea, Quiddity. This extraordinary event draws together three exceptional people: Phoebe Cobb, searching for her lover who stepped through the door; Tesla Bombeck, who must learn Everville’s secrets to prevent the horrors of the lad Uroboros from crossing the threshold; and Harry D’Amour, who has tracked evil across America and finds it invading the streets of Everville. But the mysterious and ageless Buddenbaum is intent on stopping them, and draws upon the power of his deadly patrons to ensure that the door stands open.