40
Clive Barker
glancing up the track as he did so. There was a moment’s
hesitation, no more than a moment’s, when his eyes
flickered with disbelief, before he turned towards the
windscreen, his face even paler than it had been previously, and said: “Jesus C h rist. .
in a voice that was
thick with suppressed nausea.
His lover was still sitting behind the wheel, his head in
his hands, trying to blot out memories.
“Judd . . .”
Judd looked up, slowly. Mick was staring at him like a
wildman, his face shining with a sudden, icy sweat. Judd
looked past him. A few meters ahead the track had
mysteriously darkened, as a tide edged towards the car, a
thick, deep tide of blood. Judd’s reason twisted and
turned to make any other sense of the sight than that
inevitable conclusion. But there was no saner explanation. It was blood, in unendurable abundance, blood without end—
And now, in the breeze, there was the flavor of freshly
opened carcasses: the smell out of the depths of the
human body, part sweet, part savory.
Mick stumbled back to the passenger’s side of the VW
and fumbled weakly at the handle. The door opened
suddenly and he lurched inside, his eyes glazed.
“Back up,” he said.
Judd reached for the ignition. The tide of blood was
already sloshing against the front wheels. Ahead, the
world had been painted red.
“Drive, for fuck’s sake, drive!”
Judd was making no attempt to start the car.
“We must look,” he said, without conviction, “we
have to.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” said Mick, “but get
the hell out of here. It’s not our business . . .”
“ Plane-crash— ”
“There’s no smoke.”
“Those are human voices.”
In The Hills, The Cities
41
Mick’s instinct was to leave well alone. He could read
about the tragedy in a newspaper— he could see the
pictures tomorrow when they were grey and grainy.
Today it was too fresh, too unpredictable—
Anything could be at the end of that track, bleeding—
“We must— ”
Judd started the car, while beside him Mick began to
moan quietly. The VW began to edge forward, nosing
through the river of blood, its wheels spinning in the
queasy, foaming tide.
“No,” said Mick, very quietly. “ Please, no . . .”
“We must,” was Judd’s reply. “We must. We must.”
Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was
recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a
thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now
spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted
ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from
the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded
the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept
its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the
horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled
its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and
twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo,
and fled into the hills.
As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed
between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow
over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his
tears, and Judd, his eyes narrowed against the sight he
feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute.
A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.
Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance
out towards the north-east, he would have seen Popolac’s
head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city,
disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into
the hills. He would have known that this territory was
42
Clive Barker
beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this comer of Hell. But he didn’t see the city, and he and Mick’s last turning-point had passed.
From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were
lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.
They rounded the bend, and the ruins of Podujevo came
into sight.
Their domesticated imaginations had never conceived
of a sight so unspeakably brutal.
Perhaps in the battlefields of Europe as many corpses
had been heaped together: but had so many of them been
women and children, locked together with the corpses of
men? There had been piles of dead as high, but ever so
many so recently abundant with life? There had been
cities laid waste as quickly, but ever an entire city lost to
the simple dictate of gravity?
It was a sight beyond sickness. In the face of it the
mind slowed to a snail’s pace, the forces of reason picked
over the evidence with meticulous hands, searching for a
flaw in it, a place where it could say:
This is not happening. This is a dream of death, not
death itself.
But reason could find no weakness in the wall. This
was true. It was death indeed.
Podujevo had fallen.
Thirty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five
citizens were spread on the ground, or rather flung in
ungainly, seeping piles. Those who had not died of the
fall, or of suffocation, were dying. There would be no
survivors from that city except that bundle of onlookers
that had traipsed out of their homes to watch the contest.
Those few Podujevians, the crippled, the sick, the ancient few, were now staring, like Mick and Judd, at the carnage, trying not to believe.
Judd was first out of the car. The ground beneath his
suedes was sticky with coagulating gore. He surveyed the
carnage. There was no wreckage: no sign of a plane crash,
In The Hills, The Cities
43
no fire, no smell of fuel. Just tens of thousands of fresh
bodies, all either naked or dressed in an identical grey
serge, men, women and children alike. Some of them, he
could see, wore leather harnesses, tightly buckled around
their upper chests, and snaking out from these contraptions were lengths of rope, miles and miles of it. The closer he looked, the more he saw of the extraordinary
system of knots and lashings that still held the bodies
together. For some reason these people had been
tied together, side by side. Some were yoked on their
neighbors’ shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horseback riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads of rope in a wall of
muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with
their heads tucked between their knees. All were
in some way connected up with their fellows, tied
together as though in some insane collective bondage
game.
Another shot.
Mick looked up.
Across the field a solitary man, dressed in a drab
overcoat, was walking amongst the bodies with a revolver, dispatching the dying. It was a pitifully inadequate
act of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the
suffering children first. Emptying the revolver, filling it
again, emptying it, filling it, emptying it—
Mick let go.
He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the
injured.
“What is this?"
The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as
deadgrey as his coat.
“Uh?” he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers
through his thick spectacles.
“What’s happened here?” Mick shouted across at him.
It felt good to shout, it felt good to sound angry at the
man. Maybe he was to blame. It would be a fine thing,
just to have someone to blame.
44
Clive Barker
“Tell us— ” Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice. “Tell us, for God’s sake. Explain.”
Grey-coat shook his head. He didn’t understand a
word this young idiot was saying. It was English he
spoke, but that’s all he knew. Mick began to walk
towards him, feeling all the time the eyes of the dead on
him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in broken faces:
eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from
their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for
voices. Eyes in heads beyond howls, beyond breath.
Thousands of eyes.
He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty.
He had taken off his spectacles and thrown them aside.
He too was weeping, little jerks ran through his big,
ungainly body.
At Mick’s feet, somebody was reaching for him. He
didn’t want to look, but the hand touched his shoe and
he had no choice but to see its owner. A young man, lying
like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child lay
under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink
sticks.
He wanted the man’s revolver, to stop the hand from
touching him. Better still he wanted a machine gun, a
flamethrower, anything to wipe the agony away.
As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw
Grey-coat raise the revolver.
“Judd— ” he said, but as the word left his lips the
muzzle of the revolver was slipped into Grey-coat’s
mouth and the trigger was pulled.
Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The
back of his head opened like a dropped egg, the shell of
his skull flying off. His body went limp and sank to the
ground, the revolver still between his lips.
“We must— ” began Mick, saying the words to nobody. “We must . . .”
What was the imperative? In this situation, what must
they do?
“We must— ”
In The Hills, The Cities
45
Judd was behind him.
“Help— ” he said to Mick.
“Yes. We must get help. We must— ”
“Go.”
Go! That was what they must do. On any pretext, for
any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out of the
battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a
wound in place of a body.
“We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get
help— ”
“ Priests,” said Mick. “They need priests.”
It was absurd, to think of giving the Last Rites to so
many people. It would take an army of priests, a water
cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the benedictions.
They turned away, together, from the horror, and
wrapped their arms around each other, then picked their
way through the carnage to the car.
It was occupied.
Vaslav Jelovsek was sitting behind the wheel, and
trying to start the Volkswagen. He turned the ignition
key once. Twice. Third time the engine caught and the
wheels spun in the crimson mud as he put her into
reverse and backed down the track. Vaslav saw the
Englishmen running towards the car, cursing him. There
was no help for it— he didn’t want to steal the vehicle,
but he had work to do. He had been a referee, he had
been responsible for the contest, and the safety of the
contestants. One of the heroic cities had already fallen.
He must do everything in his power to prevent Popolac
from following its twin. He must chase Popolac, and
reason with it. Talk it down out of its terrors with quiet
words and promises. If he failed there would be another
disaster the equal of the one in front of him, and his
conscience was already broken enough.
Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek.
The thief took no notice, concentrating on maneuvering
the car back down the narrow, slippery track. Mick was
46
Clive Barker
losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to pick up
speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury,
Mick stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and
sobbing.
“Bastard!” said Judd.
Mick looked down the track. Their car had already
disappeared.
“ Fucker couldn’t even drive properly.”
“We have . . . we have . . . to catch . . . up . . .” said
Mick through gulps of breath.
“How?”
“On fo o t. . .”
“We haven’t even got a map . . . it’s in the car.”
“Jesus . . . Christ . . . Almighty.”
They walked down the track together, away from the
field.
After a few meters the tide of blood began to peter out.
Just a few congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the
main road. Mick and Judd followed the bloody tire-
marks to the junction.
The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The
tiremarks showed a left turn. “He’s gone deeper into the
hills,” said Judd, staring along the lovely road towards
the blue-green distance. “He’s out of his mind!”
“ Do we go back the way we came?”
“ It’ll take us all night on foot.”
“We’ll hop a lift.”
Judd shook his head: his face was slack and his look
lost. “Don’t you see, Mick, they all knew this was
happening. The people in the farms—they got the hell
out while those people went crazy up there. There’ll be
no cars along this road, I’ll lay you anything— except
maybe a couple of shit-dumb tourists like us— and no
tourist would stop for the likes of us.”
He was right. They looked like butchers— splattered
with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their
eyes maddened.
In The Hills, The Cities
47
“We’ll have to walk,” said Judd, “the way he went.”
He pointed along the road. The hills were darker now;
the sun had suddenly gone out on their slopes.
Mick shrugged. Either way he could see they had a
night on the road ahead of them. But he wanted to walk
somewhere— anywhere— as long as he put distance between him and the dead.
In Popolac a kind of peace reigned. Instead of a frenzy of
panic there was a numbness, a sheeplike acceptance of
>
the world as it was. Locked in their positions, strapped,
roped and harnessed to each other in a living system that
allowed {or no single voice to be louder than any other,
nor any back to labor less than its neighbor’s, they let an
insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason.
They were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one
ambition. They became, in the space of a few moments,
the single-minded giant whose image they had so brilliantly recreated. The illusion of petty individuality was swept away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling—
not a mob’s passion, but a telepathic surge that dissolved
the voices of thousands into one irresistible command.
And the voice said: go!
The voice said: take this horrible sight away, where I
need never see it again.
Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking
strides half a mile long. Each man, woman and child in
that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through
the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think
the city’s thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.
Two miles along the road Mick and Judd smelt petrol in
the air, and a little further along they came upon the VW.
It had overturned in the reed-clogged drainage ditch at
the side of the road. It had not caught fire.
48
Clive Barker
The driver’s door was open, and the body of Vaslav
Jelovsek had tumbled out. His face was calm in unconsciousness. There seemed to be no sign of injury, except for a small cut or two on his sober face. They gently
pulled the thief out of the wreckage and up out of the
filth of the ditch on to the road. He moaned a little as
they fussed about him, rolling Mick’s sweater up to
pillow his head and removing the man’s jacket and tie.
Quite suddenly, he opened his eyes.
He stared at them both.
“Are you all right?” Mick asked.
The man said nothing for a moment. He seemed not to
understand.
Then:
4
“English?” he said. His accent was thick, but the
question was quite clear.
“Yes.”
“I heard your voices. English.”
He frowned and winced.
“Are you in pain?” said Judd.
The man seemed to find this amusing.
“Am I in pain?” he repeated, his face screwed up in a
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 6