Weaveworld

by Clive Barker

  And then, quite suddenly, it dropped out of the air like a felled bird. Cal followed its descent, as with a thud it buried its point in the centre of the carpet.

  Instantly, a shock-wave ran through every inch of warp and weft, as if the knife-point had severed a strand upon which the integrity of the whole depended. And with that strand cut, the Weave was loosed.

  3

  It was the end of the world, and the beginning of worlds.

  First, a column of dervish cloud rose from the middle of the Gyre, flying up towards the ceiling. As it struck, wide cracks opened, bringing an avalanche of plaster onto the heads of all beneath. It momentarily occurred to Cal that what Suzanna and he had unleashed was now beyond their jurisdiction. Then the wonders began, and all such concerns were forgotten.

  There was lightning in the cloud, throwing arcs out to the walls and across the floor. As they sprang forth, knots from one border of the carpet to the other slipped their configurations, and the strands grew like grain in mid-summer, spilling colour as they rose. It was much as Cal and Suzanna had dreamt several nights before, only multiplied a hundredfold; ambitious threads climbing and proliferating across the room.

  The pressure of growth beneath Cal was enough to throw him off the carpet as the strands sprang from their bondage, spreading the seeds of a thousand forms to right and left. Some were swifter to rise than others, reaching the ceiling in seconds. Others chose instead to make for the windows, trailing streamers of colour as they broke the glass and raced out to meet the night.

  Everywhere the eye went there were new and extraordinary displays. At first the explosion of forms was too chaotic to be made sense of, but no sooner was the air awash with colour than the strands began to shape finer details, distinguishing plant from stone, and stone from wood, and wood from flesh. One surging thread exploded against the roof in a shower of motes, each of which, upon contact with the humus of the decaying Weave, threw out tiny shoots. Another was laying zig-zag paths of blue-grey mist across the room; a third and a fourth were intertwining, and fire-flies were leaping from their marriage, sketching in their motion bird and beast, which their companions clothed with light.

  In seconds the Fugue had filled the room, its growth so fast that Shearman’s house could not contain it. Boards were uprooted as the strands sought new territories; the rafters were thrown aside. Nor were bricks and mortar any better defence against the threads. What they couldn’t coax, they bullied; what they couldn’t bully, they simply overturned.

  Cal had no intention of being buried. Bewitching as these birth-pangs were, it could not be long before the house collapsed. He peered through the fireworks towards the place where Suzanna had been standing, but she’d already gone. The buyers were also making their escape, fighting like street dogs in their panic.

  Scrambling to his feet, Cal started to make his way to the door, but he’d got no more than two steps when he saw Shadwell moving towards him.

  ‘Bastard!’ the Salesman was screeching. ‘Interfering bastard!’

  He reached into his jacket pocket, drew out a gun, and took aim at Cal.

  ‘Nobody crosses me, Mooney!’ he screamed; then fired.

  But even as he pulled the trigger somebody leapt at him. He fell sideways. The bullet flew wide of its target.

  Cal’s saviour was Nimrod. He raced towards Cal now, his expression all urgency. He had reason. The entire house had begun to shake; there were roars of capitulation from above and below. The Fugue had reached the foundations, and its enthusiasm was about to pitch the house over.

  Nimrod seized hold of Cal’s arm, and pulled him not towards the door but towards the window. Or rather, the wall that had once contained the window, for the burgeoning Weave had torn them all out. Beyond the wreckage, the Fugue was telling its long-silenced story hither and thither, filling the darkness with further magic.

  Nimrod glanced behind him.

  ‘Are we going to jump?’ said Cal.

  Nimrod grinned, and held on even tighter to Cal’s arm. One backward glance told Cal that Shadwell had found his gun, and was aiming it at their backs.

  ‘Look out!’ he yelled.

  Nimrod’s face brightened, and he pressed his hand on the nape of Cal’s neck, to make him tuck his head down. An instant later Cal understood why, as a wave of colour sprang from the Weave, and Nimrod threw them both before it. The force carried them out through the window, and for a panicky moment they trod thin air. Then the brightness seemed to solidify and spread beneath them, and they were riding down it like surfers on a tide of light.

  The ride was over all too soon. Mere seconds later they were rudely deposited in a field some distance from the house, and the wave was off into the night, parenting all manner of flora and fauna as it went.

  Dizzied but exhilarated, Cal got to his feet, and was delighted to hear Nimrod exclaim:

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘You can speak?’

  ‘It appears so,’ said Nimrod, his grin wider than ever. I’m out of her reach here –’

  ‘Immacolata.’

  ‘Of course. She undid my rapture, to tempt the Cuckoos. And tempting I was. Did you see the woman in the blue dress?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘She fell for me on sight,’ said Nimrod. ‘Perhaps I should find her. She’s going to need some tenderness, things being what they are –’ and without another word he turned back towards the house, which was well on its way to rubble. Only as he disappeared in the confusion of light and dust did Cal notice that in his true shape Nimrod possessed a tail.

  Doubtless he could look after himself, but there were others Cal was still concerned for. Suzanna, for one, and Apolline, whom he’d last seen lying beside Freddy in the ante-chamber to the Auction Room. All was din and destruction, but he started back towards the house nevertheless, to see if he could find them.

  It was like swimming against a technicolour tide. Strands, late-born, flew and burst about him, some breaking against his body. They were kinder by far to living tissue than they were to brick. Their touch didn’t wound him, but lent him fresh energy. His body tingled as though he’d stepped from an ice-water shower. His head sang.

  There was no sign of the enemy. He hoped Shadwell had been buried in the house, but he knew too much of the luck of the wicked to believe this likely. He did however glimpse several of the buyers wandering in the brightness. They didn’t aid each other, but made their way as solitaries, either gazing at the ground for fear it open beneath their feet, or stumbling, hands masking their tears.

  As he came within thirty yards of the house there was a further burst of activity from within, as the great cloud of the Gyre, spitting lightning, shrugged off the walls that had confined it, and blossomed in all directions.

  He had time enough to see the figure of one of the buyers consumed by the cloud, then he turned and ran.

  A wave of dust threw him on his way; filaments of brightness flew to left and right of him like ribbons in a hurricane. A second wave followed, this time of brick-shards and furniture. His breath was snatched from his lips, and his legs from beneath him. Then he was performing acrobatics, head over heels, no longer knowing Heaven from Earth.

  He didn’t try to resist, even if resistance had been possible, but let the fast train take him wherever it chose to go.

  BOOK TWO

  THE FUGUE

  Part Five

  Revels

  ‘Flee into some forgotten night and be

  Of all dark long my moon-bright company;

  Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,

  There, out of all remembrance.

  make our home.’

  Waller de la Mare

  The Tryst

  I

  CAL, AMONGST MIRACLES

  1

  rue joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

  Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread before him, he felt a
s though the few fragile moments of epiphany he’d tasted in his twenty-six years – tasted but always lost – were here redeemed and wed. He’d grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumour of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire.

  It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die.

  And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.

  He was on a hill. Not high, but high enough to offer a vantage point. He got to his feet and surveyed this new-found land.

  The unknotting of the carpet had by no means finished; the raptures of the Loom were far too complex to be so readily reversed. But the groundwork was laid: hills, fields, forest, and much else besides.

  Last time he’d set eyes on this place it had been from a bird’s eye view, and the landscape had seemed various enough. But from the human perspective its profusion verged on the riotous. It was as if a vast suitcase, packed in great haste, had been upturned, its contents scattered in hopeless disarray. There appeared to be no system to the geography, just a random assembling of spots the Seerkind had loved enough to snatch from destruction. Butterfly copses and placid water-meadows; lairs and walled sanctuaries; keeps, rivers and standing stones.

  Few of these locations were complete: most were slivers and snatches, fragments of the Kingdom ceded to the Fugue behind humanity’s back. The haunted corners of familiar rooms that would neither be missed nor mourned, where children had perhaps seen ghosts or saints; where the fugitive might be comforted and not know why, and the suicide find reason for another breath.

  Amid this disorder, the most curious juxtapositions abounded. Here a bridge, parted from the chasm it had crossed, sat in a field, spanning poppies; there an obelisk stood in the middle of a pool, gazing at its reflection.

  One sight in particular caught Cal’s eye.

  It was a hill, which rose almost straight-sided to a tree-crowned summit. Lights moved over its face, and danced amongst the branches. Having no sense of direction here, he decided to make his way down towards it.

  There was music playing somewhere in the night. It came to him by fits and starts, at the behest of the breeze. Drums and violins; a mingling of Strauss and Sioux. And occasionally, evidence of people too. Whispers in the trees; shadowed figures beneath a canopy which stood in the middle of a waist-high field of grain. But the creatures were fugitive; they came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression. Whether this was because they knew him for the Cuckoo he was, or simply out of shyness, only time would tell. Certainly he felt no threat here, despite the fact that he was, in a sense, trespassing. On the contrary, he felt utterly at peace with the world and himself. So much so that his concern for the others here – Suzanna, Apolline, Jerichau, Nimrod – was quite remote. When his thoughts did touch upon them it was only to imagine them wandering as he was wandering, lost among miracles. No harm could come to them; not here. Here was an end to harm, and malice, and envy too. Having this living rapture wrapping him round, what was left to envy or desire?

  He was within a hundred yards of the hill and stood before it in amazement. The lights he’d seen from a distance were in fact human fire-flies; wingless, but describing effortless arabesques around the hill. There was no communication between them that he could hear, yet they had the precision of daredevils, their manœuvres repeatedly bringing them within a hair’s breadth of each other.

  ‘You must be Mooney.’

  The speaker’s voice was soft, but it broke the hold the lights had on him. Cal looked off to his right. Two figures were standing in the shade of an archway, their faces still immersed in darkness. All he could see were the two blue-grey ovals of their faces, hanging beneath the arch like lanterns.

  ‘Yes. I’m Mooney,’ he said. Show yourselves, he thought. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘News travels fast here,’ came the reply. The voice seemed slightly softer and more fluting than the first, but he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the same speaker. ‘It’s the air,’ said his informant. ‘It gossips.’

  Now one of the pair stepped into the night-light. The soft illumination from the hill moved on his face, lending it strangeness, but even had Cal seen it by daylight this was a face to be haunted by. He was young, yet completely bald, his features powdered to remove any modulation in skin-tone, his mouth and eyes almost too wet, too vulnerable, in the mask of his features.

  ‘I’m Boaz,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome, Mooney.’

  He took Cal’s hand, and shook it, and as he did so his companion broke her covenant with shadow.

  ‘You can see the Amadou?’ she said.

  It took Cal several seconds to conclude that the second speaker was indeed a woman, the processes of his doubt in turn throwing doubt on the sex of Boaz, for the two were very close to being identical twins.

  ‘I’m Ganza,’ said the second speaker. She was dressed in the same plain black trousers and loose tunic as her brother, or lover, or whatever he was; and she too was bald. That, and their powdered faces, seemed to confuse all the cliches of gender. Their faces were vulnerable, yet implacable; delicate, yet severe.

  Boaz looked towards the hill, where the fire-flies were still cavorting.

  ‘This is the Rock of the First Fatality,’ he told Cal. ‘The Amadou always gather here. This is where the first victims of the Scourge died.’

  Cal looked back towards the Rock, but only for a moment. Boaz and Ganza fascinated him more; their ambiguities multiplied the more he watched them.

  ‘Where are you going tonight?’ said Ganza.

  Cal shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said, ‘I don’t know a yard of this place.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘You know it very well.’

  While she spoke she was idly locking and unlocking her fingers, or so it seemed, until Cal’s eyes lingered on the exercise for two or three seconds. Then it became apparent that she was passing her fingers through the palms of the other hand, left through right, right through left, defying their solidity. The motion was so casual, the illusion – if illusion it was – so quick, that Cal was by no means certain he was interpreting it correctly.

  ‘How do they look to you?’ she enquired.

  He looked back at her face. Was the finger-trick some kind of test of his perception? It wasn’t her hands she was talking about, however.

  ‘The Amadou,’ she said. ‘How do they appear?’

  He glanced towards the Rock again.

  ‘… like human beings,’ he replied.

  She gave him a tiny smile.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he wanted to know. But she didn’t have time to reply before Boaz spoke.

  ‘There’s a Council been called,’ he said. ‘At Capra’s House. I think they’re going to re-weave.’

  That can’t be right,’ said Cal. They’re going to put the Fugue back?’

  ‘That’s what I hear,’ said Boaz.

  It seemed to be fresh news to him; had he just lifted it off the gossiping air? The times are too dangerous, they’re saying,’ he told Cal. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I don’t know any other,’ Cal said. ‘So I’ve got nothing to compare them with.’

  ‘Do we have the night?’ Ganza asked.

  ‘Some of it,’ said Boaz.

  Then we’ll go to see Lo; yes?’

  ‘It’s as good a place as any,’ Boaz replied. ‘Will you come?’ he asked the Cuckoo.

  Cal looked back towards the Amadou. The thought of staying and watching their performance a while longer was tempting, but he might not find another guide to show him the sights, and if time here was short then he’d best make the most of it.

  ‘Yes. I’ll come.’

  The woman had stopped lacing her fingers.

  ‘You’ll like Lo,’ she said, turning away, and starting off into the night.

  He followed, already full to brimming with questions, but knowing that if indeed he only had hours to taste Wonderland he
should not waste time and breath asking.

  II

  AT THE LAKE, AND LATER

  1

  here had been a moment, back in the Auction House, when Suzanna had thought her life was at an end. She’d been helping Apolline down the stairs when the walls had creaked, and it seemed the house had come down around their ears. Even now, as she stood watching the lake, she was not certain how they’d escaped alive. Presumably the menstruum had intervened on her behalf, though she had not consciously willed it to do so. There was much she had to learn about the power she’d inherited. Not least, how much it belonged to her and how much she to it. When she found Apolline, whom she’d lost in the furore, she would find out all the woman knew.

  In the meantime, she had the islands, their backs crowned with cypress trees, to wonder about, and the lisp of the waves on the stones to soothe her.

  ‘We should go.’

  Jerichau broke her reverie as softly as he could, touching the back of her neck with his hand. She had left him at the house that stood along the shore, talking with friends he’d not seen in a human life-time. They had reminiscences to exchange, in which she had no place, and which, she sensed, the others had no desire to share. Criminal talk, she’d uncharitably concluded as she left them to it. Jerichau was a thief, after all.

  ‘Why did we come here?’ she asked him.

  ‘I was born here. I know every one of these stones by name.’ His hand still rested on her shoulder. ‘Or at least I did. It seemed a good place to show you –’

  She looked away from the lake towards him. His brow was furrowed; ‘But we can’t stay,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ll want to see you at Capra’s House.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You unmade the Weave.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ she said. ‘Cal was going to be killed.’

  The furrow deepened.

  ‘Forget Cal,’ he said, his tone toughening. ‘Mooney’s a Cuckoo. You’re not.’