by Clive Barker
“Stay here a moment,” Will said to Frannie, and retraced their steps to the highest vantage point in the vicinity: a lichen-covered boulder fully ten feet high. He proceeded to scale it. He was no great climber at the best of times, he was too gangly, and by now a succession of sleep-deprived nights was taking its toll on both his strength and his coordination. In short, it was a laborious attempt, and by the time he reached the top he was panting and sweaty. He studied the vista before him as logically as his giddy head would allow, looking for some sign of Rosa, but could see none and was about to scramble down again when he caught sight of something pale, half-hidden in the dark rocks a hundred yards ahead.
“I see her!” he yelled to Frannie, and slithering down from his perch with even less dignity than he’d had climbing it, led Frannie to the place. His eyes had not been playing tricks. Rosa was lying on the ground, her face completely ashen, her teeth chattering. The yellowish color in her eyes had become almost golden. When she raised her eyes to him her gaze was no longer entirely human, and some profound repugnance in him—an animal fear of something that was not natural—kept him from going too close to her.
“What happened?” he said.
“I slipped, is all,” she said. Was her voice subtly changed too? He thought so. Or was it the fact that she seemed to be speaking close to his ear, in a whisper, when she was lying three yards away? “Get me up,” she demanded.
“Is he here?” Will said.
“Is who here?”
“Rukenau.”
“Just get me up.”
“I want an answer first.” Will said.
“It’s none of your business,” Rosa replied.
“Look. You wouldn’t even be here—” Will began.
She gave him a look that, had she not so plainly been in a severely weakened state, would have shaken him to his core, a salutary reminder that though he’d seen a half-dozen Rosa McGees in the last two days, some of them almost gentle, they were all fabrications. The true thing she was—the thing with aureate gaze and a voice that spoke in the bones of his head—that thing didn’t care how it had come here or what civilities it might owe those who’d brought it. All it wanted now was to be in the House of the World, and it was too weak to waste its time with a show of courtesy.
“Get me up,” she said again, reaching out toward Will.
He didn’t move to help her. He simply studied her face, waiting for her impatience to betray her. And so it did. She could not help but look past him to the place she wanted to be, demanding again to be helped up.
Will followed the line of her gaze, past the rocks that lay between them and the sward at the crown of the cliffs, to a spot that seemed from this distance quite unremarkable, just a patch of marshy ground. She caught his trick instantly and began to harangue him afresh.
“You don’t dare go there without me!”
“Don’t I?” he said.
She turned her fury on Frannie. “Tell him, woman! He dare not enter that house without me!”
“Maybe you should stay with her?” Will said to Frannie.
She put up no argument. By the expression on her face it was apparent the atmosphere of the place had unsettled her deeply.
“I promise I won’t step inside without you.”
“You’d better not,” Frannie said.
“If she tries anything tricky, yell.”
“Oh you’ll hear me, don’t worry,” Frannie said.
Will glanced back at Rosa. She’d given up her protests now and was lying back against the rock, staring up at the sky. It seemed her eyes were mirrors at that moment, waves of sun and shadow moving across them. He looked away; distressed, and said to Frannie, “Don’t go near her.” Then he was off, toward the place between the rocks.
VII
He was happy not to be following in Rosa’s footsteps and happy to be alone. No, never alone. The fox was with him as he went, like a second self. It was more agile than he, and several times he felt its energies urging him to walk where his lumpen body didn’t dare go. It was also more cautious. His eyes darted about looking for signs of threat; his nose was uncommonly sensitive to the scents in the wind. But there was no evidence of danger.
Nor, though he was now fifteen yards from the rocks, was there any sign of a house or the ruins of a house.
He glanced back toward Frannie and Rosa, but the ground had dipped so steeply he could no longer see them. To his right, no more than a yard from his uncertain feet, the ground fell away into a cleft of black rock a little wider than a man’s body.
One slip, he knew, and he was gone. And wouldn’t that be a pitiful end for a journey that had taken so many years and covered so many miles, from a hill and a runaway hare, from a flame and a handful of moths, from the wastes of Balthazar and a bloody bear, coming to take him in her arms? A few more yards, a few more seconds, and he’d be there at the doorstep and that journey would be ended. There’d be understanding, there’d be revelation, there’d be an end to the ache in him.
Ahead of him was a patch of bright green turf, sparkling with moisture and starred with yellow vetch. Beyond it, a small rocky outcrop, which the birds apparently used to crack their catch upon, because it was littered with broken crab shells and spattered with white shit. Beyond that, the boulders between which Rosa had been staring so intently.
It wasn’t a particularly tricky maneuver to get from where he stood to his destination, but he took his time, his body trembling with a mixture of fatigue and exhilaration. He crossed the patch of grass without incident, though it was as slick as ice beneath his boots, then he proceeded to clamber up the outcrop, the gully at his back. The first couple of handholds were simple enough, but the higher he climbed the more his body’s betrayal escalated. His eyes began to flicker wildly, turning the rock in front of him to a blur. His hands and feet had become numb.
There was a good deal more than exhaustion at work, he realized. His body was responding to an outside influence, some energy in the air or earth that was tempting his system to treason. The blurring of his sight was sickening; he felt nausea rising in him. To ward it off he closed his eyes, tight, trusting to what little feeling he had left in his hands to guide him up the rest of the way. It was a dangerous business, given that the gully was right behind him to swallow him if he fell, but the risk paid off. Three more handholds and he was up onto the top of the rock, brushing shards of crab shells off his palms.
He opened his eyes. Their motion had quieted a little in the murk behind his lids, but as soon as the light hit them they began to spasm again. He reached out to grab hold of the boulders on either side of him, focusing as best he could on the patch of green that lay between them. Then, keeping his numbed hands pressed against the stones, he started to fumble his way into the windless passage.
It was not just his sight and sense of touch that had gone awry. His ears had joined the rebellion. The chorus of wheeling birds and the boom of surf had decayed into a general noise that sloshed around in his skull like mud. All he could hear with any clarity was his own raw breath, drawn and delivered. He would not be able to get much further in this state, he knew. Another three, four steps and his dead legs would fold up under him or something in his head would snap. The house had put up its defenses, and they were successfully repelling him.
He forced his barely functioning limbs to take another step, clinging to the boulders as best he could to keep from trusting his full weight to his legs. How far was he from the grassy space that had once been his destination? He no longer knew. It was academic anyway. He would never make it. And yet, the idiot ghost of that ambition remained, haunting his failing sinews Maybe another step, another two steps, just to see if he could make it to the open space.
“Come on,” he muttered to himself, the syllables as raw as his breath. “Move . . .”
His growls worked. His reluctant legs carried him another step and another after that. Suddenly the wind was on his face again. He had reached the end of the pass
age and was out into the open air.
Having no other choice, he let go of the boulders, and sank down to his knees. The ground was sodden beneath him, cold water spattered up against his groin and belly. He teetered for a few minutes and then pitched forward onto his hands. The scene was an incoherent blur before him: a haze of green for the earth, a haze of gray above it for the sky. He was about to close his eyes against the sight when he glimpsed, in the middle of this muddied field of vision, a sliver of clarity. It was thin, but sharp, as though his eyes, for all their cavorting, had here resolved their confusions. He could see every blade of grass in crystalline detail, and the sun-gilded fringes of the clouds, as they slid past the aperture.
It’s open, he thought. The door’s open, just a fraction, and I’m looking through it, peering into, the house the Nilotic built.
His legs would not carry him to the place, but he’d damn well get there on his hands and knees. As he started to crawl he remembered the solemn promise he’d made to Frannie and felt a spasm of guilt that he was breaking it. But he wasn’t so mortified that it slowed his crawl. He wanted to be there more than anything right now. More than promises, certainly. More than life probably, and sanity, too.
Keeping his eyes fixed on the sliver of the open door, he crawled through the muck to the place where it stood, and forsaking all he hoped, believed, and understood, entered the House of the World.
VIII
The last Frannie saw of Will he was attempting to scale the rocky outcrop at the head of the gully. Then her attention had been claimed by Rosa, who’d started to moan piteously, tearing at her bandages. When Frannie looked back in Will’s direction, he’d gone. She assumed at first he’d scaled the rocks and was now through the passage and onto the slope beyond, but though she watched for him, she saw no sign. Slowly, a grim possibility took shape: that in the minute or so that she’d been trying to stop Rosa reopening her wound, Will had lost his balance and toppled back into the gully. The longer she stared and failed to see him the more probable this came to seem. She hadn’t heard him cry out, but with the birds so loud was that any great surprise?
Fearing what she would see, she ventured from Rosa’s side and followed Will’s route along the edge of the gully, yelling to him as she went.
“Where are you? For God’s sake answer me! Will?” There was no reply. Nor was there any sign of his having fallen. No blood on the rocks, no place where the grass had been uprooted. But these absences were little comforts. She knew perfectly well he could have slipped down into the gully without leaving a trace: a straight fall between the rocks, down into the impenetrable darkness.
She had almost reached the head of the gully by now, the spot where she’d last seen Will. Should she climb up and see if he was simply squatting on the far side of the rocks? Of course she should. But something drew her eyes back to the gully, and she stared into its abyss, afraid now to call his name, afraid he’d answer out of the darkness.
And then she saw him—or thought she did—lying in the depths of the gully maybe twenty feet down. Her heart beating feverishly, she got down on her knees and went to the very edge of the gully to verify what she was seeing. There was no doubt. There was no doubt. There was a man lying on the rocks at the bottom of the gully. It could only be Will. She tried yelling to him, but he didn’t move a muscle. Perhaps he was already dead, perhaps he was merely stunned. Certainly she couldn’t waste time going for help: a half hour back to the car, another ten, twenty minutes to find a phone, how much longer before rescuers appeared? She had to do something herself, find a way down into the gully and help him. It was a grim prospect. She’d never been agile, even as a girl, and though the relative slightness of her build would make it physically feasible for her to clamber down into the darkness, if she herself slipped she’d end up broken-bodied beside Will and that would effectively be the end of both of them. Two more fatalities to add to the headland’s grim reputation.
But she had no other choice. She plainly couldn’t leave Will to die. She simply had to put her fears aside and get to work. Her first task was to find the safest route of descent. She walked back along the gully in the seaward direction until she found a spot where the walls of the crevice were relatively close together, so that she might descend using both sides for hand and footholds.
It wasn’t perfect—perfect was a ladder with a large cushion at its base—but it was the best she was going to get. She sat down on the tuft of grass beside the spot and dangled her feet over the edge. Then, without giving herself time to doubt the wisdom of what she was doing, she slipped her bottom off the grass and, after a few heart-quickening moments with her feet in midair and her body sliding off the tuft, her toes found a ledge on the opposite wall, against which she now braced herself. There followed a minute of clumsy maneuvering while she turned herself around so that she was facing the grass off which she’d slid.
There were probably ten easier ways to do what she was doing, she thought, but right now her brain wasn’t quick enough to think them through.
She glanced down before she made her next move, which was an error. Her muscles seized up for several seconds, and she could feel the sweat oozing out of her palms and armpits, its smell sour with fear.
“Take hold of yourself, Frannie,” she chided herself. “You can do this.”
Then, taking a deep breath, she renewed her descent, hold by hesitant hold, only this time she didn’t make the mistake of looking down—at least not all the way down—but limited her gaze to the rock, studying it for nicks and cracks where she might find purchase.
Only once, when she thought she heard somebody calling to her, did she look up, hesitating for a moment to listen for the cry again. It came, but it was not a human voice, it was just one of the birds whose call had an almost human timbre. She returned to the labor of descent determined not to look up at the sky again, whether she heard cries or no. It was upsetting, seeing the light bounded by two walls of rock, getting narrower as she descended. From now on she would look no further than her hands and feet, until she was down beside Will and planning their ascent.
Rosa had long ago ceased to care what Frannie thought or did, but she was intrigued, albeit remotely, to see the woman disappearing from sight into the crevice. Had she got too close to the Domus Mundi and had her wits burned up? If so, it surely hadn’t been much of a fire. Well, never mind. She was gone now, and wouldn’t be coming back, which left Rosa alone. She let her head drop back against the shit-splattered rock and stared up at the sky. The clouds had covered the sun completely now, at least to human eyes. But she could see it still, or imagined she could: a bright ball flaming in the glorious nowhere of space.
Was that where she belonged, she found herself wondering.
When she was no longer Rosa, which would be soon, very, when her wounded body gave up the last of its life, would she ascend like smoke, and be gone toward the sun? Or into the dark between the stars, perhaps. Yes, that would be better. To be lost in the dark utterly and forever, a nameless thing that had endured too may lifetimes, and lost its appetite for life and light.
But before she went, perhaps she still had it in her to reach Rukenau’s step, to knock and ask him: What was it for? Why did I live?
If she was going to do so then she was going to have to do it soon, what little strength she had left was quickly departing her body. She had thought it would give her one last burst of vitality if she opened her wound, like a whip applied to her own back.
But she’d simply traumatized her body further, and there was precious little power left in her.
She took her eyes from the sun and pushed herself into a sitting position. As she did so her instincts provided some information she’d been expecting to receive: Steep had set foot on the island. She didn’t doubt the report. She and Steep had traced each other over vast distances in their time; she knew what his proximity felt like. He was on his way. When he arrived he would do murderous harm, and she had little or no defense against
it. All she could do was to press her body to her purpose and hope to reach the door before he did. Perhaps Rukenau would play judge and jury, perhaps he would find fault with Steep and stop him in his tracks. Or perhaps the house was empty, and they would come into its chambers like thieves into a looted palace, expecting glory and finding nothing. The notion gave her a thrill of perverse pleasure: After this desperate pursuit they might both end up empty-handed. And she could die and go to the darkness between the stars. And he would live, and live, because the man he’d become was afraid of death, and that would be his punishment for being death’s agent, that he could never be delivered from existence, but would go on and on.
IX
It had entertained Jacob mightily to go among the stoic fisherman of Oban as though the harbor were the shores of Galilee, and he looking for disciples. He found one after a little search; a man in his late sixties by the name of Hugh who had been pleased to take a passenger over to Tiree for a modest sum. The fee was quickly agreed upon and they left a little after eight-fifteen, following the route of the Claymore up the sound. The ship was of course a great deal more powerful than Hugh’s little boat, but unlike the Claymore they did not have any ports of call to delay them along the way, so that they came into the little harbor at Scarinish no more than two hours after the ferry.
The voyage had refreshed and replenished Jacob. He had not slept, but he had fallen into a meditative mood as he watched the sea. He had never understood why it was so often thought to be a feminine element. Yes, there were tides in a woman’s body that were not to be found in a man, and yes, it was the place of genesis. But it was also ambitious and dispassionate, slow in its workings against the land, but inevitable. Surely then it was the earth that was woman’s lot, the nurturing place, warm and fertile. The deeps belonged to men.
So he mused as they sailed. And by the time he stepped off the boat onto the pier his mind was pleasantly lulled, as though he had just finished writing in his journal and was ready to turn a fresh page.