by Clive Barker
‘Oh yes. She killed them herself, while the three of them were still in the womb. Strangled them with their own cords.’
True or not, the image was sickening. And more sickening still, the thought of the sisters’ touch. Cal tried to put both from his mind as he advanced, Shadwell still at his side. All pretence to negotiation had vanished; there were only threats now.
‘You’re a dead man. Mooney, if you don’t confess. I won’t lift a finger to help you –’
Cal was within hailing distance of the men.
He shouted across to them. They broke off their drinking, and turned in his direction.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘This man –’ Cal began, looking towards Shadwell.
But the Salesman had gone. In the space of seconds he’d left Cal’s side and melted into the crowd, an exit as skilful as his entrance.
‘Got some trouble?’ the bigger of the two men wanted to know.
Cal glanced back at the man, fumbling for words. There was no use his trying to explain, he decided.
‘No …’ he said, ‘… I’m all right. I just need some air.’
‘Too much to drink?’ said the other man, and stood aside to let Cal step out into the street.
It was chilly after the suffocation of the hall, but that was fine by Cal. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his head. Then, a familiar voice.
‘Do you want to go home?’
It was Geraldine. She was standing a short way from the door, a coat draped over her shoulders.
‘I’m all right,’ he told her. ‘Where’s your father?’
‘I don’t know. Why do you want him?’
‘There’s somebody in there who shouldn’t be,’ said Cal, crossing to where she stood. To his drunken gaze she seemed more glamorous than he’d ever seen her; eyes shining like dark gems.
‘Why don’t we walk together a little way?’ she said.
‘I have to speak to your father,’ he insisted, but she was already turning from him, laughing lightly. Before he could voice a protest she was away around the corner. He followed. There were a number of lamps not working along the street, and the silhouette he dogged was fitful. But she trailed her laughter still, and he went after it.
‘Where are you going?’ he wanted to know.
She only laughed again.
Above their heads the clouds were moving quickly, stars glimmering between, their fires too feeble to illuminate much below. They caught Cal’s eye for an instant, and when he looked back at Geraldine she was turning to him, making a sound somewhere between a sigh and a word.
The shadows that embraced her were dense, but they unfolded even as he watched, and what they revealed made his gut somersault. Geraldine’s face had dislodged somehow, her features running like heated wax. And now, as the facade fell away, he saw the woman beneath. Saw, and knew: the browless face, the joyless mouth. Who else but Immacolata?
He would have run then, but that he felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his temple, and the Salesman’s voice said:
‘Make a sound and it’s going to hurt.’
He kept his silence.
Shadwell gestured towards the black Mercedes that was parked at the next intersection.
‘Move,’ he said.
Cal had no choice, scarcely believing, even as he walked, that this scene was taking place on a street whose paving cracks he’d counted since he was old enough to know one from two.
He was ushered into the back of the car, separated from his captors by a partition of heavy glass. The door was locked. He was powerless. All he could do was watch the Salesman slide into the driver’s seat, and the woman get in beside.
There was little chance he’d be missed from the party, he knew, and littler chance still that anyone would come looking for him. It would simply be assumed that he’d tired of the festivities and headed off home. He was in the hands of the enemy, and helpless to do anything about it.
What would Mad Mooney do now, he wondered.
The question vexed him only a moment, before the answer came. Taking out the celebratory cigar Norman had given him, he leaned back in the leather seat, and lit up.
Good, said the poet; take what pleasure you can, while there’s still pleasure to be had. And breath to take it with.
V
IN THE ARMS OF MAMA PUS
n the haze of fear and cigar smoke he soon lost track of their route. His only clue to their whereabouts, when they finally came to a halt, was that the air smelt sharply of the river. Or rather, of the acreage of black mud that was exposed at low tide; expanses of muck which he’d had a terror of as a child. It wasn’t until he’d reached double figures that he’d been able to walk along Otterspool Promenade without an adult between him and the railings.
The Salesman ordered him from the car. He got out obediently – it was difficult not to be obedient with a gun in his face. Shadwell immediately snatched the cigar from Cal’s mouth, grinding it beneath his heel, then escorted him through a gate into a walled compound. Only now, as he laid eyes on the canyons of household refuse ahead did Cal realize where they’d brought him: the Municipal Rubbish Tip. In former years, acres of parkland had been built on the city’s detritus, but there was no longer the money to transform trash into lawns. Trash it remained. Its stench – the sweet and sour of rotting vegetable matter – even overpowered the smell of the river.
‘Stop,’ said Shadwell, when they reached a place that seemed in no way particular.
Cal looked round in the direction of the voice. He could see very little, but it seemed Shadwell had pocketed his gun. Seizing the instant, he began to run, not choosing any particular direction, merely seeking escape. He’d covered maybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister’s children. He was glad of the darkness; at least he couldn’t see their deformities. But he felt their limbs upon him; heard their teeth snapping at his neck.
They didn’t intend to devour him, however. At some cue he neither saw nor heard, their violence dwindled to mere bondage. He was held fast, his body so knotted up his joints creaked, while a terrible spectacle unfolded a few yards in front of him.
It was one of Immacolata’s sisters, he had no doubt of that: a naked woman whose substance flickered and smoked as though her marrow was on fire, except that she could have no marrow, for surely she had no bones. Her body was a column of grey gas, laced with strands of bloody tissue, and from this flux fragments of finished anatomy emerged: a seeping breast, a belly swollen as if by a pregnancy months beyond its term, a smeared face in which the eyes were sewn-up slits. That explained, no doubt, her hesitant advance, and the way her smoky limbs extended from her body to test the ground ahead: the ghost was blind.
By the light this unholy mother gave off, Cal could see the children more clearly. No perversion of anatomy had been overlooked amongst them: bodies turned inside out to parade the bowel and stomach; organs whose function seemed simply to seep and wheeze lining the belly of one like teats, and mounted like a coxcomb on another’s head. Yet despite their corruptions, their heads were all turned adoringly upon Mama Pus, their eyes unblinking so as not to miss a moment of her presence. She was their mother; they her loving children.
Suddenly, she started to shriek. Cal turned to look at her again. She’d taken up a squatting posture, her legs splayed, her head thrown back as she voiced her agony.
Behind her there now stood a second ghost, as naked as the first. More so perhaps, for she could scarcely lay claim to flesh. She was obscenely withered, her dugs like empty purses, her face collapsed upon itself in a jumble of tooth-shard and hair. She’d taken hold of her squatting sister, whose scream had now reached a nerve-shredding height. As the swollen belly came close to bursting, there was an issue of smouldering matter from between the mother’s
legs. The sight was greeted with a chorus of welcomes from the children. They were entranced. So, in his horrified way, was Cal.
Mama Pus was giving birth.
The scream became a series of smaller, rhythmic shouts as the child began its journey into the living world. It was less born than shat, dropping from between its parent’s legs like a vast mewling turd. No sooner had it hit the ground than the withered midwife was about her business, coming between mother and spectators to draw away veils of redundant matter from the child’s body. The mother, her labours over, stood up, the flame in her flesh dying, and left the child to her sister’s ministrations.
Now Shadwell came back into view. He looked down at Cal.
‘Do you see?’ he said, his voice all but a whisper, ‘what kind of horrors these are? I warned you. Tell me where the carpet is and I’ll try to make sure the child doesn’t touch you.’
‘I don’t know. I swear I don’t.’
The midwife had withdrawn. Shadwell, a sham of pity on his face, now did the same.
In the dirt a few yards from Cal the child was already standing up. It was the size of a chimpanzee, and shared with its siblings the appearance of something traumatically wounded. Portions of its inner workings were teased out through its skin, leaving its torso to collapse upon itself in places and in others sport ludicrous appendages of gut. Twin rows of dwarf limbs hung from its belly, and between its legs a sizeable scrotum depended, smoking like a censer, uncompanioned by any organ to discharge what boiled within.
The child knew its business from its first breath: to terrorize.
Though its face was still wreathed with afterbirth, its gummy eyes found Cal, and it began to shamble towards him.
‘Oh Jesus …’
Cal began looking for the Salesman, but the man had vanished.
‘I told you,’ he yelled into the darkness, ‘I don’t know where the fucking carpet is.’
Shadwell didn’t respond. Cal shouted again. Mama Pus’ bastard was almost upon him.
‘Jesus, Shadwell, listen to me, will you?’
Then, the by-blow spoke.
‘Cal …’ it said.
He stopped struggling against his restraints a moment, and looked at it in disbelief.
It spoke again. The same syllable.
‘Cal …’
Even as it pronounced his name its fingers pulled at the muck about its head. The face that appeared from beneath lacked a complete skull, but it was recognizably that of its father: Elroy. Seeing familiar features in the midst of such deformity was the crowning horror. As Elroy’s child reached to touch him Cal started yelling again, scarcely aware of what he was saying, only begging Shadwell to keep the thing from touching him.
The only reply was his own voice, echoing back and forth until it died. The child’s arms jerked forward, and its long fingers latched onto Cal’s face. He tried to fight it off, but it drew closer to him, its sticky body embracing him. The more he struggled the more he was caught.
The rest of the by-blows loosed their hold on him now, leaving him to the new child. It was only minutes old, but its strength was phenomenal, the vestigial hands on its belly raking Cal’s skin, its grip so tight his lungs laboured for breath.
With its face inches from Cal’s, it spoke again, but the voice that came from the ruined mouth was not its father’s this time, but that of Immacolata.
‘Confess.’ she demanded. ‘Confess what you know.’
‘I just saw a place –’ he said, trying to avoid the trail of spittle that was about to fall from the beast’s chin. He failed. It hit his cheek, and burned like hot fat.
‘Do you know what place?’ the Incantatrix demanded.
‘No …’ he said. ‘No, I don’t –’
‘But you’ve dreamt it, haven’t you? Wept for it …’
Yes, was the answer; of course he’d dreamt it. Who hadn’t dreamt of paradise?
Momentarily his thoughts leapt from present terror to past joy. To his floating over the Fugue. The sight of that Wonderland kindled a sudden will to resist in him. The glories he saw in his mind’s eye had to be preserved from the foulness that embraced him, from its makers and masters, and in such a struggle his life was not so hard to forfeit. Though he knew nothing about the carpet’s present whereabouts he was ready to perish rather than risk letting anything slip that Shadwell might profit by. And while he had breath, he’d do all in his power to confound them.
Elroy’s child seemed to read this new-found resolution. It drew its arms more tightly about him.
‘I’ll confess!’ he yelled in its face. ‘I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
Immediately, he began to talk.
The substance of his confession was not, however, what they wanted to hear. Instead he began to recite the train timetable out of Lime Street, which he knew by heart. He’d first started learning it at the age of eleven, having seen a Memory Man on television who’d demonstrated his skills by recalling the details of randomly chosen football matches – teams, scores, scorers – back to the 1930s. It was a perfectly useless endeavour, but its heroic scale had impressed Cal mightily, and he’d spent the next few weeks committing to memory any and every piece of information he could find, until it struck him that his magnum opus was passing to and fro at the bottom of the garden: the trains. He’d begun that day, with the local lines, his ambition elevated each time he successfully remembered a day’s times faultlessly. He’d kept his information up to date for several years, as services were cancelled or stations closed. And his mind, which had difficulty putting names to faces, could still spew this perfectly redundant information out upon request.
That’s what he gave them now. The services to Manchester, Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Cheltenham Spa, Reading, Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury, London, Colchester; all the times of arrival and departure, and footnotes as to which services only operated on Saturdays, and which never ran on Bank Holidays.
I’m Mad Mooney, he thought, as he delivered this filibuster, listing the services with a bright, clear voice, as if to an imbecile. The trick confounded the monster utterly. It stared at Cal while he talked, unable to understand why the prisoner had forsaken fear.
Immacolata cursed Cal through her nephew’s mouth, and offered up new threats, but he scarcely heard them. The timetables had their own rhythm, and he was soon carried along by it. The beast’s embrace grew tighter; it could not be long before Cal’s bones began to break. But he just went on talking, drawing in gulps of breath to start each day, and letting his tongue do the rest.
It’s poetry, my boy, said Mad Mooney. Never heard its like. Pure poetry.
And maybe it was. Verses of days, and lines of hours, transmuted into the stuff of poets because it was all spat into the face of death.
They’d kill him for this defiance, he knew, when they finally realized that he’d never exchange another meaningful word with them. But Wonderland would have a gate for ghosts.
He had just begun the Scottish services – to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee – when he caught sight of Shadwell from the corner of his eye. The Salesman was shaking his head, and now exchanged some words with Immacolata – something about having to ask the old woman. Then he turned, and walked into the darkness. They’d given up on their prisoner. The coup de grace could only be seconds away.
He felt the grip relax. His recitation faltered for an instant, in anticipation of the fatal blow. It didn’t come. Instead, the creature withdrew its arms from around him, and followed behind Shadwell, leaving Cal lying on the ground. Though released, he could scarcely move; his bruised limbs were rigid with cramp after being held fast for so long.
And now he realized that his troubles were not over. He felt the sweat on his face turning cold, as the mother of Elroy’s terrible infant drew herself towards him. He could not escape her. She straddled his body, then reached down and drew his face up towards her breasts. His muscles complained at this con
tortion, but the pain was forgotten an instant after, as she put her nipple to his lips. A long-neglected instinct made him accept it. The breast spurted a bitter fluid down his throat. He wanted to spit it out, but his body lacked the strength to reject it. Instead he felt his consciousness flee from this last degeneracy. A dream eclipsed the horror.
He was lying in darkness on a scented bed, while a woman’s voice sang to him, some wordless lullaby whose cradle rhythms were shared by a feather-light touch upon his body. Fingers were playing on his abdomen and groin. They were cold, but they knew more tricks than a whore. He was hard in a heart-beat; gasping in two. He’d never felt such caresses, coaxed by agonizing degrees to the point of no return. His gasps became cries, but the lullaby drowned them out, mocking his manhood with its nursery lilt. He was a helpless infant, despite his erection; or perhaps because of it. The touch grew more demanding, his cries more urgent.
For an instant his thrashings shook him from his dream, and his eyes flickered open long enough to see that he was still in the sister’s sepulchral embrace. Then the smothering slumber claimed him again, and he discharged into an emptiness so profound it devoured not only his seed but the lullaby and its singer; and, finally, the dream itself.
He woke alone, and weeping. Every ligament tender, he untied the knot he’d made of himself, and stood up.
His watch read nine minutes after two. The last train of the night had left Lime Street long ago; and the first of Sunday morning would not run for many hours yet.
VI
SICK SOULS
1
ometimes Mimi woke; sometimes she slept. But one was much like the other now: sleep marred by distress and discomfort – wakefulness full of unfinished thoughts that faded into scraps of nonsense, like dreams. One moment she was certain there was a small child crying in the corner of the room, until the night nurse came in, and wiped the tears from her patient’s eyes. Another moment she could see, as if through a dirtied window, some place she knew, but had lost, and her old bones ached with wanting to be there.