by Clive Barker
He did not need to voice his response. Thought was enough.
‘And you did?’ he answered.
‘I didn’t know myself,’ Immacolata told him. ‘I think this Scourge is the same.’
‘It’s called Uriel,’ Shadwell reminded her, ‘it’s an Angel.’
‘Whatever it is, you have no power over it.’
‘I freed it.’ Shadwell responded. ‘It obeys me.’
‘Why lie?’ Immacolata said. ‘I know when you’re afraid.’
The din of destruction broke the exchange. Shadwell looked up from his thoughts to see Uriel, its tendrils extended across the wall, sweep all the bones from their places like so much crockery from a piled table. They fell around it in a dusty litter, the remains of fully half a hundred people.
Uriel laughed – another trick it had caught from Shadwell – the sound made more distressing by its artificiality. It had found a game it liked. Turning to the next wall it proceeded to vandalize that in the same manner; then on to the third.
‘Tell it to stop …’ Immacolata’s ghost whispered, as bones large and small joined the myriad on the ground, ‘If you’re not afraid: tell it to stop.’
But Shadwell simply watched as the Angel cleared the fourth wall at a stroke, then turned its attention to the ceiling.
‘You’ll be next,’ Immacolata said.
Shadwell flattened himself against the now naked brick as remains rained down.
‘No …’ he murmured.
The bones stopped falling; there were none left on either walls or ceiling. Slowly, the dust began to settle. Uriel turned to Shadwell.
‘Why do you whisper behind my back?’ it enquired lightly.
Shadwell glanced towards the door. How far would he get if he tried to run now? A yard or two, probably. There was no escape. It knew; it heard.
‘Where is she?’ Uriel demanded. The demolished chamber was hushed from one end to the other. ‘Make her show herself.’
‘She used me,’ Shadwell began. ‘She’ll tell you lies. Tell you I loved raptures. I didn’t. You must believe me. I didn’t.’
He felt the Angel’s countless eyes upon him; their stare silenced him.
‘You can hide nothing from me,’ the Angel pronounced. ‘I know what you’ve desired, in all its triviality, and you needn’t fear me.’
‘No?’
‘No. I enjoy the dust you are. Shadwell. I enjoy your futility, your meaningless desires. But the other that’s here – the woman whose raptures I can smell – she I want to kill. Tell her to show herself and be done with it.’
‘She’s dead already.’
‘So why does she hide?’
‘I don’t,’ came Immacolata’s voice, and the bones on the floor churned like a sea as the ghost rose from them. Not simply from them but of them, defying Uriel’s destruction as her will made a new anatomy from the fragments. The result was far more than a sum of its parts. It was, Shadwell saw, not one but all of the sisters, or a projection of their collective spirit.
‘Why should I hide from you?’ the monument said. Every shard in its body revolved as she spoke.
‘Are you happy now?’ she asked.
‘What is happy?’ Uriel wanted to know.
‘Don’t bother to protest your innocence,’ the phantom said. ‘You know you don’t belong in this world.’
‘I came here before.’
‘And you left. Do so again.’
‘When I’m done,’ Uriel replied. ‘When the rapture-makers are extinguished. That’s my duty.’
‘Duty?’ Immacolata said, and her bones laughed.
‘Why do I amuse you?’ Uriel demanded.
‘You are so deceived. You think you’re alone –’
‘I am alone.’
‘No. You’ve forgotten yourself; and so you’ve been forgotten.’
‘I am Uriel. I guard the gate.’
‘You are not alone. Nobody – nothing – is alone. You’re part of something more.’
‘I am Uriel. I guard the gate.’
‘There’s nothing left to guard,’ Immacolata said. ‘But your duty.’
‘I am Uriel. I–’
‘Look at yourself. I dare you. Throw the man you’re wearing away, and look at yourself.’
Uriel did not speak its reply, but shrieked it.
‘I WILL NOT!’
And with its words it unleashed its fury against the body of bones. The statue flew apart as the fire struck it, burning fragments shattering against the walls. Shadwell shielded his face as Uriel’s flame ran back and forth across the chamber to eradicate the Incantatrix’s image completely. It was not satisfied for a long while, scouring each corner of the Shrine until every last offending shard was chased to ash.
Only then did that same sudden tranquillity descend that Shadwell loathed so much. The Angel sat Hobart’s wretched body on a pile of bones, and picked up a skull between the fire-blackened hands.
‘Might it not be cleaner …’ the Angel said, its words measured, ‘…if we emptied the whole world of living things?’
The suggestion was floated so delicately, its tone so perfectly a copy of Shadwell’s Reasonable Man, that it took him a moment to comprehend the ambition of what it proposed.
‘Well?’ it said. ‘Might it not?’
It looked up at Shadwell. Though its features were still in essence Hobart’s, all trace of the man had been banished from them. Uriel shone from every pore.
‘I asked a question,’ it said. ‘Would that not be fine?’
Shadwell murmured that it would.
‘Then we should see such a fire, shouldn’t we?’ it said, rising from its seat of bones. It went to the door, and stared off down the passageway, where the caskets still burned.
‘Oh …’ it said with yearning in its voice. ‘… such a fire.’
Then, eager not to delay its goal’s consummation by a moment, it started back towards the stairs, and the sleeping Kingdom beyond.
III
THE SECRET ISLE
1
he train was an hour late reaching Birmingham. When it finally arrived the snow was still falling, and taxis couldn’t be had for love nor money. Cal asked for directions to Harborne, and waited in line for twenty-five minutes to board the bus, which then crawled from stop to stop, taking on further chilled passengers until it was so overburdened it could carry no more. Progress was slow. The city-centre was snarled with traffic, reducing everything to a snail’s pace. Once out of the centre the roads were hazardous – dusk and snow conspiring to cut visibility – and the driver never risked more than ten miles an hour. Everyone sat in wilful cheerfulness, avoiding each others’ eyes for fear of having to make conversation. The woman who’d seated herself beside Cal was nursing a small terrier, encased in a tartan coat, and a picture of misery. Several times he caught its doleful eyes regarding him, and returned its gaze with a consoling smile.
He’d eaten on the train, but he still felt lightheaded, utterly divorced from the dismal scenes their route had to offer. The wind slapped him from his reverie, however, once he stepped out of the bus on Harborne Hill. The woman with the tartan dog had given him directions to Waterloo Road, assuring him that it was a three-minute trot at the outside. In fact it took him almost half an hour to find, during which time the chill had clawed its way through his clothes and into his marrow.
Gluck’s house was a large, double-fronted building, its facade dominated by a monkey-puzzle tree which rose to challenge the eaves. Twitching with cold, he rang the bell. He didn’t hear it sound in the house, so he knocked, hard, then harder. A light was turned on in the hallway, and after what seemed an age the door was opened, to reveal Gluck, the remains of a chewed cigar in his hand, grinning and instructing him to get in out of the cold before his balls froze. He didn’t need a second invitation. Gluck closed the door after him, and threw a piece of carpet against it to keep out the draught, then led Cal down the hallway. It was a tight squeeze. The passage was all but ch
oked by cardboard boxes, piled to well above head height.
‘Are you moving?’ Cal asked, as Gluck ushered him into an idyllically warm kitchen which was similarly littered with boxes, bags and piles of paperwork.
‘Good God, no,’ Gluck replied. ‘Take off your wet stuff. I’ll fetch you a towel.’
Cal skinned off his soaked jacket and equally sodden shirt, and was taking off his shoes, which oozed water like sponges, when Gluck returned with not only a towel but a sweater and a pair of balding corduroys.
‘Try these,’ he said, slinging the clothes into Cal’s lap. ‘I’ll make some tea. You like tea?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I live on tea. Sweet tea and cigars.’
He filled the kettle and lit the antiquated gas cooker. That done he fetched a pair of hiker’s socks from the radiator, and gave them to Cal.
‘Getting warmer?’ he asked.
‘Much.’
‘I’d offer you something stronger,’ he said, as he produced tea-caddy, sugar and a chipped mug from a cupboard. ‘But I don’t touch it. My father died of drink.’ He put several heaped spoons of tea into the pot. ‘I must tell you,’ he said, wreathed in steam, ‘I never expected to hear from you again. Sugar?’
‘Please.’
‘Pick up the milk, will you? We’ll go through to the study.’
Taking the pot, sugar and mug, he led Cal out of the kitchen and upstairs to the first landing. It was in the same condition as the floor below: its decoration neglected, its lamps without shades, and heaped everywhere the same prodigious amount of paperwork, as though some mad bureaucrat had willed Gluck his life’s work.
He pushed open one of the doors and Cal followed him into a large, cluttered room – more boxes, more files – which was hot enough to grow orchids in, and reeked of stale cigar smoke. Gluck set the tea down on one of the half-dozen tables, claiming his own mug from beside a heap of notes, then drew two armchairs up beside the electric fire.
‘Sit. Sit,’ he exhorted Cal, whose gaze had been drawn to the contents of one of the boxes. It was full, to brimming, with dried frogs.
‘Ah,’ said Gluck. ‘No doubt you’re wondering …’
‘Yes,’ Cal confessed, ‘I am. Why frogs?’
‘Why indeed?’ Gluck replied, ‘It’s one of the countless questions we’re trying to answer. It isn’t just frogs, of course. We get cats; dogs; a lot of fish. We’ve had tortoises. Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise. That’s one of the first recorded falls.’
‘Falls?’
‘From the heavens,’ said Gluck. ‘How many sugars?’
‘Frogs? From the sky?’
‘It’s very common. Sugars?’
‘Two.’
Cal peered into the box again, and took a trio of frogs out. Each was tagged; on the tag was written the date it fell, and where. One had come down in Utah, one in Dresden, a third in County Cork.
‘Are they dead on arrival?’ he asked.
‘Not always,’ said Gluck, handing Cal his tea. ‘Sometimes they arrive unharmed. Other times, in pieces. There’s no pattern to it. Or rather, there is. but we’ve still to find it.’ He sipped his tea noisily. ‘Now –’ he said, ‘– you’re not here to talk about frogs.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘What are you here to talk about?’
‘I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Those are always the best tales,’ Gluck declared, his face glowing. ‘Begin with the most preposterous.’
Cal smiled; here was a man ready for a story.
‘Well –’ he said, taking a deep breath. And he began.
He’d intended to keep the account short, but after ten minutes or so Gluck began to interrupt his story with disgressionary questions. It consequently took several hours to tell the whole thing, during which Gluck smoked his way through an heroic cigar. At last, the narrative reached Gluck’s doorstep, and it became shared memory. For two or three minutes Gluck said nothing, nor did he even look at Cal, but studied the debris of stubs and matches in the ashtray. It was Cal who broke the silence.
‘Do you believe me?’ he said.
Gluck blinked, and frowned, as though he’d been stirred from thoughts of something entirely different.
‘Shall we make some more tea?’ he said.
He tried to stand up, but Cal took fierce hold of his arm.
‘Do you believe me?’ he demanded.
‘Of course,’ said Gluck, with a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘I think I’m obliged to. You’re sane. You’re articulate. You’re damnably particular. Yes, I believe you. But you must understand, Cal, that in doing so I deliver a mortal blow to several of my fondest illusions. You are looking at a man in mourning for his theories.’ He stood up. ‘Ah well …’ he picked up the pot from the table, then set it down again. ‘Come next door,’ he said.
There were no curtains at the window of the next room. Through it Cal saw that the snow had thickened to near-blizzard proportions while he’d been talking. The garden at the back of the house, and the houses beyond, had become a white nowhere.
But Gluck hadn’t brought him in to show him the view; it was the walls he was directing Cal’s attention to. Every available inch was covered with maps, most of which looked to have been up there since the world was young. They were stained with an accrual of cigar smoke, scrawled over in a dozen different pens, and infested with countless coloured pins, each presumably marking a place where some anomalous phenomenon had occured. And on the fringes of these maps, tacked up in mind-boggling profusion, were photographs of the events: grainy, thumb-nail pictures, foot-wide enlargements, strips of sequential images lifted from a home movie. There were many he could make no sense of, and others that looked patently fake. But for every blurred or phony photograph there were two that pictured something genuinely startling, like the frumpy woman standing in a domestic garden up to her ankles in what seemed to be a trawler’s deep-sea catch; or the policeman standing guard outside a three-storey house which had fallen over on its face, though not a single brick was out of place; or the car bonnet which bore the imprint of two human faces, side by side. Some of the pictures were comical in their casual weirdness, others had a grim authenticity about them – the witnesses sometimes distressed, sometimes shielding their faces – that was anything but amusing. But all, whether ludicrous or alarming, went to support the same thesis: that the world was stranger than most of Humankind ever assumed.
‘This is just the tip of the iceberg –’ said Gluck. ‘I’ve got thousands of these photographs. Tens of thousands of testimonies.’
Some of the pictures, Cal noted, were linked by threads of various colours to pins in the maps.
‘You think there’s a pattern here?’ said Cal.
‘I believe so. But now, after hearing what you’ve told me, I begin to think maybe I was looking in the wrong place for it. Some of my evidence, you see, overlaps with your account. For the last three weeks – while you were trying to contact me – Max and I were up in Scotland, looking at a site we just found in the Highlands. We picked up some very strange articles there. I’d assumed it was a landing place of some kind for our visitors. I think now I was wrong. It was probably the valley your unweaving took place in.’
‘What did you find?’
‘The usual debris. Coins, clothing, personal effects of one kind or another. We boxed them all up, and brought them back down with us to examine at leisure. We could have made them fit our pet theories, you know … but now I think much of that’s in ruins.’
‘I’d like to see that stuff,’ Cal said.
‘I’ll unpack it for you,’ said Gluck. His expression, since Cal had told his story, had been that of a deeply perplexed man. Even now he surveyed the map room with something akin to despair. In the past few hours he’d seen his whole world-view thrown into disarray.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cal.
‘What for?’ Gluck replied. ‘Telling me about miracles? Please don’t be. I’ll just as happily believe in
your mystery as in mine. It’ll just take a little time to adjust. All I ask is that the mystery be there.’
‘Oh it is,’ said Cal. ‘Believe me, it is. I just don’t know where.’
His attention strayed from Gluck’s face to the window, and the blank scene beyond. More and more he feared for his beloved exiles. The night, the Scourge and the snow all seemed to be conspiring to erase them.
He crossed to the window; the temperature plummeted as he approached the icy glass.
‘I have to find them,’ he said. ‘I have to be with them.’
He’d successfully kept his sense of desolation at bay until now; but sobs suddenly wracked him. He heard Gluck come to his side, but he didn’t have sufficient mastery of himself to control his tears: they kept falling. Gluck put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s good to see somebody so in need of the miraculous,’ he said. ‘We’ll find your Seerkind, Mooney. Trust me. If there’s a clue to their whereabouts, it’s here.’
‘We have to be quick,’ Cal said softly.
‘I know. But we’ll find them. Not just for you, but for me. I want to meet your lost people.’
‘They’re not mine.’
‘In a way they are. And you’re theirs. I could see that on your face. That’s why I believe you.’
2
‘Where do we begin?’; that was Cal’s question.
The house was packed with reports from basement to attic. Perhaps, as Gluck had said, there was somewhere amongst them a clue – a line in a report, a photograph – that would point to the Kind’s location. But where? How many testimonies would they have to dig through before they uncovered some hint of the hiding place? That assumed, of course, that in this time of jeopardy they’d band together. If not – if they were spread across the Isles – then it was a completely lost cause, as opposed to one almost lost.
Cal chided himself for that thought. It was no use being defeatist. He had to believe that there was a chance of discovery; had to believe the task before them wasn’t just a way to occupy the time before the cataclysm. He would take Gluck as his model. Gluck, who’d spent his life in pursuit of something he’d never really seen, not doubting for an instant the validity of that pursuit; Gluck, who even now was brewing tea and digging out files, behaving as though he believed to his core that the solution to their problem was close at hand.