by Clive Barker
She accelerated, the officer in front of her throwing himself out of her path with inches to spare. There was no time to look back for Cal; she skirted the collision site at speed, hoping he’d used the diversion to pick up his heels and run.
She’d travelled no more than four hundred yards when she heard the sound of sirens rising behind her.
4
It took Cal half a dozen seconds to work out what had happened, and another two to curse his sloth. There was a moment of confusion, when none of the officers seemed certain whether to wait for instructions or give chase, during which pause Suzanna was away around the corner.
The officer who’d been at the car window instantly made his way in Cal’s direction, his pace picking up with every step.
Cal pretended he hadn’t seen the man, and began to walk speedily back up towards the monument. There was a shouted summons, and then the sound of pursuit. He ran, not looking behind him. His pursuer was heavily dressed against the rain; Cal was much lighter footed. He made a left into Lower Castle Street, and another onto Brunswick Street, then a right onto Drury Lane. The sirens had begun by now; the bikes were in pursuit of Suzanna.
On Water Street he chanced a backward glance. His pursuer was not in sight. He didn’t slow his pace, however, until he’d put half a mile between himself and the police. Then he hailed himself a taxi and headed back to the house, his head full of questions, and of Suzanna’s face. She’d come and gone too quickly; already he was mourning her absence.
In order to better hold onto her memory, he fumbled for the names she’d spoken; but damn it, they were gone already.
VII
LOST CAUSES
1
he blinding rain proved to be Suzanna’s ally; so, perhaps, did her ignorance of the city. She took every turn she could, only avoiding cul-de-sacs, and the lack of any rationale in her escape route seemed to flummox her pursuers. Her path brought her out into Upper Parliament Street; at which point she put on some speed. The sirens faded behind her.
But it would not be for long, she knew. The noose was tightening once more.
There were breaks in the rain-bellied clouds as she drove from the dry, and shafts of sun found their way between, leaving a sheen of gold on roof and tarmac. But for moments only. Then the clouds sealed their wound, and the benediction ceased.
She drove and drove, as the afternoon grew late, and once more she was alone.
2
Cal stood at the kitchen door. Geraldine – who was peeling an onion – looked up and said:
‘Did you forget your umbrella?’
And he thought: she doesn’t know who I am or what I am, and how could she?, because God in Heaven I don’t know either. I forget myself. Oh Jesus, why do I forget myself?
‘Are you all right?’ she was asking him, putting down the onion and the knife now and crossing the kitchen towards him. ‘Look at you. You’re soaked.’
‘I’m in trouble,’ he said flatly.
She stopped in her tracks. ‘What, Cal?’
‘I think the police may come here looking for me.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t ask. It’s too complicated.’
Her face tightened a little.
‘There was a woman on the ‘phone this afternoon,’ she said, ‘asking for your work number. Did she get through to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is she something to do with this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me, Cal.’
‘I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Are you having a fling with this woman?’
‘No,’ he said. Then thought: At least not that I remember.
‘Tell me then.’
‘Later. Not now. Later.’
He left the kitchen to the smell of onions.
‘Where are you going?’ she called after him.
‘I’m soaked to the skin.’
‘Cal.’
‘I have to get changed.’
‘How bad is this trouble you’re in?’
He stopped half way up the stairs, pulling off his tie.
‘I can’t remember,’ he replied, but a voice at the back of his head – a voice he hadn’t heard in a long while – said: Bad son, bad, and he knew it spoke the bitter truth.
She followed him as far as the bottom of the stairs. He went into the bedroom, and peeled off his wet clothes, while she continued to ply him with questions for which he had no replies, and with every unanswered question he could hear her voice get closer to tears. He knew he’d call himself a louse for this tomorrow (what was tomorrow?; another dream), but he had to be away from the house again quickly, in case the police came looking for him. He had nothing to tell them of course – at least he could remember nothing. But they had ways, these people, of making a man speak.
He rummaged through the wardrobe, looking for a shirt, jeans and a coat, not giving a conscious thought to the choice. As he slipped on the thread-bare jacket he glanced out of the window. The street-lights had just come on; the rain was a silver torrent in their glare. A chilly night for a jaunt, but it couldn’t be helped. He dug in his work suit for his wallet, which he transferred to his pocket, and that was it.
Geraldine was still at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at him. She had successfully fought off tears.
‘And what am I supposed to tell them,’ she demanded, ‘if they come looking for you?’
‘Say I came and went. Tell them the truth.’
‘Maybe I won’t be here,’ she said. Then, warming to the idea. ‘Yes. I don’t think I’ll be here.’
He had neither the time nor the words to offer any genuine solace.
‘Please trust me,’ was all he could find to say. ‘I don’t know what’s happening any more than you do.’
‘Maybe you should see a doctor, Cal,’ she said as he came downstairs. ‘Maybe …’ – her voice softened – ‘… you’re ill.’
He stopped his descent.
‘Brendan told me things –’ she went on.
‘Don’t bring Dad into this.’
‘No, listen to me,’ she insisted. ‘He used to talk to me, Cal. Told me things in confidence. Things he thought he’d seen.’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘He said he’d seen some woman killed in the back garden. And some monster on the railway track.’ She smiled gently at the lunacy of this.
Cal stared down at her, suddenly sick to his stomach. Again, he thought: I know this.
‘Maybe you’re having hallucinations too.’
‘He was telling stories to keep you amused,’ said Cal. ‘He used to like to make stuff up. It was the Irish in him.’
‘Is that what you’re doing, Cal?’ she said, pleading for some reassurance. ‘Tell me it’s a joke.’
‘I wish to God I could.’
‘Oh, Cal –’
He went to the bottom of the stairs and softly stroked her face.
‘If anyone comes asking –’
‘I’ll tell them the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Thank you.’
As he crossed to the front door she said:
‘Cal?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re not in love with this woman are you? Only I’d prefer you to tell me if you are.’
He opened the door. The rain slapped the doorstep.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said, and made a dash to the car.
3
After half an hour on the motorway the effects of a night without sleep, and all that the subsequent day had brought, began to catch up with Suzanna. The road in front of her blurred. She knew it was only a matter of time before she fell asleep at the wheel. She turned off the motorway at the first service stop, parked the car and went in search of a caffeine fix.
The cafeteria and amenities were thronged with customers, which she was thankful for. Amongst so many people, she was insignificant. Anxious about leaving the Weave a moment longer th
an she needed to, she purchased coffee from the vending machine rather than wait in a serpentine queue, then bought chocolate and biscuits from the shop and went back to the car.
Switching on the radio, she settled down to her stopgap meal. As she unwrapped the chocolate her thoughts went again to Jerichau, the thief-magician, producing stolen goods from every pocket. Where was he now? She toasted him with her coffee, and told him to be safe.
At eight, the news came on. She waited for some mention of herself, but there was none. After the bulletin there was music; she let it play. Coffee drunk, chocolate and biscuits devoured, she slid down in the seat and her eyes closed to a jazz lullaby.
She was woken, mere seconds later, by a knocking on the window. There was a period of confusion while she worked out where she was, then she was wide awake, and staring with sinking heart at the uniform on the other side of the rain-streaked glass.
‘Please open the door,’ the policeman said. He seemed to be alone. Should she just turn on the engine and drive away? Before she could reach any decision the door was wrenched open from the outside.
‘Get out,’ the man said.
She complied. Even as she stepped from the car she heard the sound of soles on gravel on all sides of her.
Against the glare of the neon, a man stood silhouetted.
‘Yes,’ was all he said, and suddenly there were men coming at her from all sides. She was about to dig for the menstruum, but the silhouette was approaching her, with something in its hand. Somebody tore the sleeve from her arm, she felt the needle slide into her exposed skin. The subtle body rose, but not quickly enough. Her will grew sluggish, her sight narrowed to a well-shaft. At the end of it, Hobart’s mouth. She tumbled towards the man, her fingers gouging the slime on the walls, while the beast at the bottom roared its hosannas.
VIII
NEW EYES FOR OLD
he Mersey was high tonight, and fast; its waters a filthy brown, its spume grey. Cal leaned on the promenade railing and stared across the churning river to the deserted shipyards on the far bank. Once this waterway had been busy with ships, arriving weighed down with their cargo and riding high as they headed for faraway. Now, it was empty. The docks silted up, the wharfs and warehouses idle. Spook City; fit only for ghosts.
He felt like one himself. An insubstantial wanderer. And cold too, the way the dead must be cold. He put his hands in his jacket pocket to warm them, and his fingers found there half a dozen soft objects, which he took out and examined by the light of a nearby lamp.
They looked like withered plums, except that the skin was much tougher, like old shoe-leather. Clearly they were fruit, but no variety he could name. Where and how had he come by them? He sniffed at one. It smelt slightly fermented, like a heady wine. And appetizing; tempting even. Its scent reminded him that he’d not eaten since lunchtime.
He put the fruit to his lips, his teeth breaking through the corrugated skin with ease. The scent had not deceived; the meat inside did indeed have an alcoholic flavour, the juke burning his throat like cognac. He chewed, and had the fruit to his lips for a second bite before he’d swallowed the first, finishing it off, seeds and all, with a fierce appetite.
Immediately, he began to devour another of them. He was suddenly ravenous. He lingered beneath the wind-buffeted lamp, the pool of light he stood in dancing, and fed his face as though he’d not eaten in a week.
He was biting into the penultimate fruit when it dawned on him that the rocking of the lamp above couldn’t entirely account for the motion of the light around him. He looked down at the fruit in his hand, but he couldn’t quite focus on it. God alive! Had he poisoned himself? The remaining fruit dropped from his hand and he was about to put his fingers down his throat to make himself vomit up the rest when the most extraordinary sensation overtook him.
He rose up: or at least some part of him did.
His feet were still on the concrete, he could feel it solid beneath his soles, but he was still floating up, the lamp shining beneath him now, the promenade stretching out to right and left of him, the river surging against the banks, wild and dark.
The rational fool in him said: you’re intoxicated; the fruits have made you drunk.
But he felt neither sick nor out of control; his sight (sights) were clear. He could still see from the eyes in his head, but also from a vantage point high above him. Nor was that all he could see. Part of him was with the litter too, gusting along the promenade; another part was out in the Mersey, gazing back towards the bank.
This proliferation of viewpoints didn’t confuse him: the sights mingled and married in his head, a pattern of risings and fallings; of looking out and back and far and near.
He was not one but many.
He Cal; he his father’s son; he his mother’s son; he a child buried in a man, and a man dreaming of being a bird.
A bird!
And all at once it all came back to him; all the wonders he’d forgotten surged back with exquisite particularity. A thousand moments and glimpses and words.
A bird, a chase, a house, a yard, a carpet, a flight (and he the bird; yes! yes!); then enemies and friends; Shadwell, Immacolata; the monsters; and Suzanna, his beautiful Suzanna, her place suddenly clear in the story his mind was telling itself.
He remembered it all. The carpet unweaving, the house coming apart; then into the Fugue, and the glories that the night there had brought.
It took all his new-found senses to hold the memories, but he was not overwhelmed. It seemed he dreamed them all at once; held them in a moment that was sweet beyond words: a reunion of self and secret self which was an heroic remembering.
And after the recognition, tears, as for the first time he touched the buried grief he felt at losing the man who’d taught him the poem he’d recited in Lo’s orchard: his father, who’d lived and died and never once known what Cal knew now.
Momentarily, sorrow and salt drew him back into himself, and he was single-sighted once more, standing under the uncertain light, bereft –
Then his soul soared again, higher now, and higher, and this time it reached escape velocity.
Suddenly he was up, up above England.
Below him moonlight fell on bright continents of cloud, whose vast shadows moved over hill-side and suburb like silent ushers of sleep. He went too, carried on the same winds. Over tracts of land which pylons strode in humming lines; and city streets the hour had emptied of all but felons and wild dogs.
And this flight, gazing down like a lazy hawk, stars at his back, the isle beneath him, this flight was companion to that other he’d taken, over the carpet, over the Fugue.
No sooner had his mind turned to the Weaveworld than he seemed to sniff it – seemed to know where it lay beneath him. His eye was not sharp enough to pick out its place, but he knew he could find it, if he could only keep this new sense intact when he finally returned to the body beneath him.
The carpet was North-North-East of the city, that he was certain of; many miles away and still moving. Was it in Suzanna’s hands?; was she fleeing to some remote place where she prayed their enemies wouldn’t come? No, the news was worse than that, he sensed. The Weaveworld and the woman who carried it were in terrible jeopardy, somewhere below him –
At that thought his body grew possessive of him once more. He felt it around him – its heat, its weight – and he exalted in its solidity. Flying thoughts were all very well, but what were they worth without muscle and bone to act upon them?
A moment later he was standing beneath the light once more, and the river was still churning and the clouds he’d just seen from above moved in mute flotillas before a wind that smelt of the sea. The salt he tasted was not sea-salt; it was the tears he’d shed for the death of his father, and for his forgetting, and for his mother too perhaps – for it seemed all loss was one loss, all forgetting one forgetting.
But he’d brought new wisdom from the high places. He knew now that things forgotten might be recalled; things lost, found a
gain.
That was all that mattered in the world: to search and find.
He looked North-North-East. Though the many sights he’d had were once more narrowed to one, he knew he could still find the carpet.
He saw it with his heart. And seeing it, started in pursuit.
IX
A SECRET PLACE
uzanna stirred from her drugged sleep only slowly. At first the effort to keep her lids open for more than a few seconds was too much for her, and her consciousness struggled in darkness. But by degrees her body was cleansing itself of whatever Hobart had put into her veins. She just had to let it do that job in its own good time.
She was in the back of Hobart’s car; that much was clear. Her enemy was in the front seat beside the driver. At one point he looked round, and saw that she was waking, but said nothing. He just stared at her for a little time, then returned his attentions to the road. There was something uncomfortably lazy about the look in his eyes, as if he was certain now of what the future would bring and had no need to hurry towards it.
In her drowsy state it was difficult to calculate time, but surely hours passed as they drove. Once she opened her eyes to find them passing through a sleeping city – she did not know which – then the remnants of the drug won her over again and when next she woke they were travelling a winding country road, lightless hills rising to either side. Only now did she realize that Hobart’s car was leading a convoy; there were headlamps shining through the back window from the vehicles behind. She summoned up strength enough to turn round. There was a Black Maria following, and several vehicles behind that.
Again, drowsiness overtook her for a timeless while.
It was cold air that woke her again. The driver had opened the window, and the air had brought goose-pimples to her arms. She sat up and breathed deeply, letting the chill slap her to wakefulness. The region they were driving through was mountainous. The Scottish Highlands, she presumed; where else would there still be snowy peaks in the middle of spring? They took a route now that led them off the road onto a rocky track, which slowed their pace considerably. The track rose, winding. The engine of the van behind laboured; but the road got rougher and steeper still before it delivered them to the top of the hill.