by Clive Barker
‘Yes I am,’ she insisted. ‘Or least that’s what I feel I am, and that’s the important thing …’
His hand dropped from her shoulder. He was suddenly sullen.
‘Are you coming or not?’ he said.
‘Of course I’m coming.’
He sighed.
‘It wasn’t meant to be this way,’ he said, his voice recapturing some of its former gentility.
She wasn’t sure what he was speaking of: the unweaving, his reunion with the lake, or the exchange between them. Perhaps a little of each.
‘Maybe it was a mistake to unmake the Weave,’ she said, somewhat defensively, ‘but it wasn’t just me. It was the menstruum.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘It’s your power,’ he said, not without rancour. ‘Control it.’
She gave him a frosty look. ‘How far is Capra’s House?’
‘Nothing’s far in the Fugue,’ he replied. The Scourge destroyed most of our territories. Only these few remain.’
‘Are there more in the Kingdom?’
‘A few maybe. But all we really care for is here. That’s why we have to hide it again, before morning.’
Morning. She’d almost forgotten that the sun would soon be rising and, with it. Humankind. The thought of her fellow Cuckoos – with their taste for zoos, freak-shows and carnivals – invading this territory did not much amuse her.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We have to be quick,’ and together they went up from the lake towards Capra’s House.
2
As they walked Suzanna had answered several questions that had been vexing her since the unweaving. Chief amongst them: what had happened to the portion of the Kingdom that the Fugue had invaded? It was not well populated certainly – there was the considerable acreage of Thurstaston Common behind the Auction House, and fields to either side; but the area was not entirely deserted. There were a number of houses in the locality, and up towards Irby Heath the population grew denser still. What had happened to those residences? And indeed to their occupants?
The answer was quite simple: the Fugue had sprung up around them, accommodating their existence with a kind of wit. Thus a line of lamp-posts, their fluorescence extinguished, had been decorated with blossoming vines like antique columns; a car had been almost buried in the side of a hill, another two had been tipped on their tails and leaned nose to nose.
The houses had been less recklessly treated; most were still complete, although the flowerage of the Fugue reached to their very doorsteps, as if awaiting an invitation inside.
As to the Cuckoos, she and Jerichau encountered a few, all of whom seemed more puzzled than fearful. One man, dressed only in trousers and braces, was complaining loudly that he’d lost his dog – ‘Damn fool mutt,’ he said. ‘You seen him?’ – and seemed indifferent to the fact that the world had changed around him. It was only after he’d headed off, still calling after the runaway, that Suzanna wondered if the fellow was seeing what she saw, or whether the same selective blindness that kept the haloes from human eyes was at work here. Was the dog-owner wandering familiar streets, unable to see beyond the cell of his assumptions? Or perhaps just glimpsing the Fugue from the corner of his eye, a glory he’d remember in his dotage, and weep over?
Jerichau had no answers to these questions. He didn’t know, he said, and he didn’t care.
And still the visions unfurled. With every step she took her astonishment grew at the variety of places and objects the Seerkind had saved from the conflagration. The Fugue was not, as she’d anticipated, simply a collection of haunted groves and thickets. Holiness was a far more democratic condition; it informed fragments of every kind: intimate and momentous, natural and artificial. Each corner and niche had its own peculiar mode of rapture.
The circumstances of their preservation meant that most of these fragments had been torn from their context like pages from a book. Their edges were still raw with the violence of that removal, and the haphazard way they’d been thrown together only made their disunity seem more acute. But there were compensations. The very disparity of the pieces – the way the domestic abutted the public; the commonplace, the fabulous – created fresh conundrums; hints of new stories that these hitherto unconnected pages might tell.
Sometimes the journey showed them collisions of elements so unlikely they defied any attempt to synthesize them. Dogs grazing beside a tomb, from the fractured lid of which rose a fountain of fire that ran like water; a window set in the ground, its curtains billowing skyward on a breeze that carried the sound of the sea. These riddles, defying her powers of explanation, marked her profoundly. There was nothing here that she hadn’t seen before – dogs, tombs, windows, fire – but in this flux she found them re-invented, their magic made again before her eyes.
Only once, having been told by Jerichau that he had no answers to her questions, did she press him for knowledge, and that was regarding the Gyre, whose covering of cloud was perpetually visible, its brightest lightning bursts throwing hill and tree into relief.
That’s where the Temple of the Loom is,’ he said. The closer you get to it the more dangerous it becomes.’
She remembered something of this from that first night, when they’d talked of the carpet. But she wanted to know more.
‘Why dangerous?’ she asked.
The raptures required to make the Weave were without parallel. It required great sacrifice, great purity, to control them and knit them. More than most of us would ever be capable of. Now the power protects itself, with lightning and storms. And wisely. If the Gyre’s broken into, the Weave rapture won’t hold. All we’ve gathered here will come apart; be destroyed.’
‘Destroyed?’
‘So they say. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I’ve got no grasp of the theoretical stuff.’
‘But you can perform raptures.’
The remark seemed to baffle him. ‘That doesn’t mean I can tell you how,’ he said, ‘I just do ‘em.’
‘Like what?’ she said. She felt like a child, asking for tricks from a magician, but she was curious to know the powers residing in him.
He made an odd face; one full of contradictions. There was a shyness there; something quizzical; something fond.
‘Maybe I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘One of these times. I can’t sing or dance, but I’ve got ways with me.’ He stopped speaking, and walking too.
She didn’t need any sign from him to hear the bells that were in the air around them. They were not the bells of a steeple – these were light and melodic – but they summoned nevertheless.
‘Capra’s House,’ he said, striding ahead. The bells, knowing they were heard, rang them on their way.
III
DELUSIONS
1
he bulletin that had gone out from Hobart’s Division announcing the escape of the anarchists had not gone unheard; but the alarm had come a little before eleven, and the patrols were dealing with the nightly round of fist-fights, drunken driving and theft which climaxed about that time. In addition there’d been a fatal stabbing on Seel Street, and a transvestite had been the cause of a near-riot in a pub on the Dock Road. Thus, by the time any serious attention had been paid to the alarm-call, the escapees were long gone; slipped through the Mersey Tunnel on their way to Shearman’s house.
But on the opposite side of the river, just outside Birkenhead, a vigilant patrolman by the name of Downey caught sight of them. Leaving his partner in a Chinese restaurant ordering Chop Suey and Peking Fried Duck, Downey gave chase. The radio alert warned that these miscreants were extremely dangerous, and that no attempt should be made to apprehend them single-handed. Patrolman Downey therefore kept a discreet distance, aided in this by a thorough knowledge of the area.
When the villains finally reached their destination, however, it became apparent that this was no ordinary pursuit. For one, when he reported his location to Division he was told that things there were in considerable disarray – could he hear a
man sobbing in the background? – and that this matter would be dealt with by Inspector Hobart in person. He was to wait, and watch.
It was while he was waiting and watching that he had his second proof that something untoward was in the air.
It began with lights flickering in the second-storey windows of the house; then exploding into the outside world, taking wall and window with it.
He got out of his car and began to walk towards the house. His mind, used to filing reports, was already scrabbling for adjectives to describe what he was seeing, but he kept coming up empty-handed. The brilliance that spilled from the house did not resemble anything he had witnessed or dreamt of before.
He was not a superstitious man. He immediately sought a secular explanation for the things he saw, or almost saw, all around him; and seeking, found. He was viewing UFO activity; that was surely it. He’d read reports of similar events happening to perfectly ordinary Joes like himself. It was not God or lunacy he was facing, but a visitation from a neighbouring galaxy.
Content that he had some grasp on the situation, he hurried back to the car to put his report through to headquarters. He was stymied, however. There was white noise on all frequencies. No matter: he’d informed them of his location on first arriving. They’d come to his aid presently. In the meanwhile his task was to watch this landing like a hawk.
That task rapidly became more difficult, as the invaders began to bombard him with extraordinary illusions, designed, no doubt, to conceal their operations from human sight. The waves of force that had burst from the house threw the car on its side (or at least that’s what his eyes informed him; he was not about to take it as Gospel); then vague forms began to roil about him. The tarmac beneath his feet seemed to sprout flowers; bestial forms were performing acrobatics above his head.
He saw several members of the public similarly ensnared by these projections. Some stared up at the sky, others were on their knees praying for sanity.
And it came, by and by. Knowing that these images were merely phantoms gave him strength to resist them. Over and over he told himself that what he was seeing was not real, and by degrees the visions bowed to his certainty, grew faint, and finally faded almost entirely.
He scrambled into the over-turned car and tried the radio again, though he had no idea if anybody was hearing it or not. Oddly, he wasn’t that concerned. He’d beaten the delusions, and that conviction sweetened his vigil. Even if they came for him now – the monsters that had landed here tonight – he would not fear them. He would put out his own eyes rather than let them bewitch him afresh.
2
‘Any further word?’
‘There’s nothing, sir,’ said Richardson. ‘Only din.’
‘Forget it then,’ said Hobart. ‘Just drive. We’ll sniff them out if it takes us all fucking night.’
As they travelled, Hobart’s thoughts returned to the scene he’d left behind him. His men reduced to babbling idiots, his cells defiled with shit and prayers. He had a score to settle with these forces of darkness.
Once upon a time he would not have cast himself so readily in the role of avenger. He’d been squeamish in admitting to any degree of personal involvement. But experience had made an honest man of him. Now – at least in the company of his men – he didn’t pretend to be removed from the issues at hand, but confessed freely the heat in his belly.
After all, the business of pursuit and punishment was just a way to spit in the eye of one who had already spat on you. The Law, just another word for revenge.
IV
ALLEGIANCES
1
t was eighty years, give or take half a decade, since the three sisters had trodden the earth of the Fugue. Eighty years of exile in the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, worshipped and reviled by turns, almost losing their sanity amongst the Adamaticals, but driven to endure countless mortifications by their hunger one day to have the Weaveworld in their avenging grasp.
Now they hung in the air above that rapturous earth – its touch so antithetical that walking upon it was a trial – and surveyed the Fugue from end to end.
‘It smells too much alive,’ said the Magdalene, lifting her head to the wind.
‘Give us time,’ Immacolata told her.
‘What about Shadwell?’ the Hag wanted to know. ‘Where is he?’
‘Out looking for his clients, probably,’ the Incantatrix replied. ‘We should find him. I don’t like the thought of his wandering here unaccompanied. He’s unpredictable.’
‘Then what?’
‘We let the inevitable happen,’ said Immacolata, gently swinging round to take in every sacred yard of the place. ‘We let the Cuckoos tear it apart.’
‘What about the Sale?’
‘There’ll be no Sale. It’s too late.’
‘Shadwell’s going to know you used him.’
‘No more than he used me. Or would have liked to.’
A tremor passed through the Magdalene’s uncertain substance.
‘Wouldn’t you like to give yourself to him once?’ she enquired softly. ‘Just once.’
‘No. Never.’
Then let me have him. I can use him. Imagine his children.’
Immacolata reached out and grasped her sister’s fragile neck. ‘You will never lay a hand on him,’ she said. ‘Not a finger.’
The wraith’s face grew absurdly long, in a parody of remorse.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s yours. Body and soul.’
The Hag laughed. The man’s got no soul.’ she said.
Immacolata released the Magdalene, filaments of her sister’s matter decaying into sewer air between them.
‘Oh, he has a soul,’ she said, letting gravity claim her for the earth beneath. ‘But I want no part of it.’ Her feet touched the ground. ‘When all this is over – when the Seerkind are in the Cuckoo’s hands – I’ll let him go his way. Unharmed.’
‘And us?’ said the Hag. ‘What happens to us then? Will we be free?’
‘That’s what we agreed.’
‘We can go into extinction?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
‘More than anything,’ said the Hag. ‘More than anything.’
‘There are worse things than existence,’ said Immacolata.
‘Oh?’ the Hag replied. ‘Can you name one?’
Immacolata thought for a short while.
‘No,’ she conceded, with a soft sigh of distress. ‘You may be right, sister.’
2
Shadwell had fled from the disintegrating house moments after Cal and Nimrod had escaped through the window, and had barely avoided being caught by the cloud that had swallowed Devereaux. He’d ended up face down, his mouth filled with dust and with the sour taste of defeat. After so many years of anticipation, to have the Auction end in ruin and humiliation, it was enough to make him weep.
But he didn’t. For one thing, he was an optimist by nature: in today’s rejection the seeds of tomorrow’s sale. For another, the spectacle of the Fugue solidifying about him was a fine distraction from his sorrows. And for a third, he had found one worse off than he.
‘What the fuck is happening?’ It was Norris, the Hamburger King. Blood and plaster dust vied for the right to paint his face, and somewhere in the maelstrom he’d lost both the back of his jacket and most of his trousers; also one of his fine Italian shoes. The other he carried.
I’ll sue the ass off you!’ he screeched at Shadwell. ‘You fucking asshole. Look at me! Fucking asshole!”
He began to beat Shadwell with the shoe, but the Salesman was in no mood to be bruised. He slapped the man back, hard. Within seconds they were brawling like drunkards, indifferent to the extraordinary scenes coming to life all around them. The tussle left them more breathless and bloody than they’d started out, and did nothing to resolve their differences.
‘You should have taken precautions!’ Norris spat.
‘It’s too late for accusations,’ Shadwell replied. ‘The Fugue’s woken whet
her we like it or not.’
‘I would have woken it myself,’ said Norris. ‘If I’d got to own it. But I would have been ready and waiting. Had some forces to go in and take control. But this? It’s chaos! I don’t even know which way is out.’
‘Any way’ll do. It’s not that big. If you want out, just walk in any direction.’
This simple solution seemed to pacify Norris somewhat. He turned his gaze on the burgeoning landscape.
‘I don’t know though …’ he said, ‘… maybe it’s better this way. At least I get to see what I would have bought.’
‘And what do you make of it?’
It’s not the way I’d thought it’d be. I’d expected something … tamer. Frankly, I’m not sure now I’d want to own the place.’
As his voice faltered an animal that could surely be found in no menagerie jumped from the flux of threads and snarled a welcome at the world before bounding off.
‘See?’ said Norris. ‘What was that?’
Shadwell shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. There’s things here that probably died out before we were born.’
‘That?’ said Norris, staring after the hybrid beast. ‘I never saw the like of that before, even in books. I tell you I want none of this fucking place. I want you to get me out.’
‘You’ll have to find your own way,’ said Shadwell. ‘I’ve got business here.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Norris, pointing his shoe at Shadwell. ‘I need a body-guard. And you’re it.’
The sight of the Hamburger King reduced to this nervous wreckage amused Shadwell. More than that, it made him feel – perhaps perversely – secure.
‘Look,’ he said, his manner softening. ‘We’re both in the same shit here –’
‘Damn right we are.’
‘I’ve got something that might help,’ he said, opening his jacket, ‘– something to sweeten the pill.’
Norris looked suspicious. ‘Oh yeah?’