mixture of agony and delight. “I shall die,” he said,
through gritted teeth.
“No,” said Mick. “You’re all right— ”
The man shook his head, his authority absolute.
“I shall die,” he said again, the voice full of determination, “ I want to die.”
Judd crouched closer to him. His voice was weaker by
the moment.
“Tell us what to do,” he said. The man had closed his
eyes. Judd shook him awake, roughly.
“Tell us,” he said again, his show of compassion
rapidly disappearing. “Tell us what this is all about.”
“About?” said the man, his eyes still closed. “ It was a
fall, that’s all. Just a fall . . .”
“What fell?”
In The Hills, The Cities
49
“The city. Podujevo. My city.”
“What did it fall from?”
“Itself, of course.”
The man was explaining nothing; just answering one
riddle with another.
“Where were you going?” Mick inquired, trying to
sound as unaggressive as possible.
“After Popolac,” said the man.
“Popolac?” said Judd.
Mick began to see some sense in the story.
“Popolac is another city. Like Podujevo. Twin cities.
They’re on the map— ”
“Where’s the city now?” said Judd.
Vaslav Jelovsek seemed to choose to tell the truth.
There was a moment when he hovered between dying
with a riddle on his lips, and living long enough to
unburden his story. What did it matter if the tale was
told now? There could never be another contest: all that
was over.
“They came to fight,” he said, his voice now very soft,
“Popolac and Podujevo. They come every ten years— ”
“Fight?” said Judd, “You mean all those people were
slaughtered?”
Vaslav shook his head.
“No, no. They fell. I told you.”
“Well how do they fight?” Mick said.
“Go into the hills,” was the only reply.
Vaslav opened his eyes a little. The faces that loomed
over him were exhausted and sick. They had suffered,
these innocents. They deserved some explanation.
“As giants,” he said. “They fought as giants. They
made a body out of their bodies, do you understand? The
frame, the muscles, the bone, the eyes, nose, teeth all
made of men and women.”
“He’s delirious,” said Judd.
“You go into the hills,” the man repeated. “See for
yourselves how true it is.”
50
Clive Barker
“Even supposing— ” Mick began.
Vaslav interrupted him, eager to be finished. “They
were good at the game of giants. It took many centuries
of practice: every ten years making the figure larger and
larger. One always ambitious to be larger than the other.
Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews . . .
ligaments . . . There was food in its belly . . . there were
pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The
best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best voiced in the
mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering
of it.”
“I don’t,” said Judd, and stood up.
“ It is the body of the state,” said Vaslav, so softly his
voice was barely above a whisper, “it is the shape of our
lives.”
There was a silence. Small clouds passed over the
road, soundlessly shedding their mass to the air.
“It was a miracle,” he said. It was as if he realized the
true enormity of the fact for the first time. “It was a
miracle.”
It was enough. Yes. It was quite enough.
His mouth closed, the words said, and he died.
Mick felt this death more acutely than the thousands
they had fled from; or rather this death was the key to
unlock the anguish he felt for them all.
Whether the man had chosen to tell a fantastic lie as he
died, or whether this story was in some way true, Mick
felt useless in the face of it. His imagination was too
narrow to encompass the idea. His brain ached with the
thought of it, and his compassion cracked under the
weight of misery he felt.
They stood on the road, while the clouds scudded by,
their vague, grey shadows passing over them towards the
enigmatic hills.
It was twilight.
Popolac could stride no further. It felt exhaustion in
In The Hills, The Cities
51
every muscle. Here and there in its huge anatomy deaths
had occurred; but there was no grieving in the city for its
deceased cells. If the dead were in the interior, the
corpses were allowed to hang from their harnesses. If
they formed the skin of the city they were unbuckled
from their positions and released, to plunge into the
forest below.
The giant was not capable of pity. It had no ambition
but to continue until it ceased.
As the sun slunk out of sight Popolac rested, sitting on
a small hillock, nursing its huge head in its huge hands.
The stars were coming out, with their familiar caution.
Night was approaching, mercifully bandaging up the
wounds of the day, blinding eyes that had seen too much.
Popolac rose to its feet again, and began to move, step
by booming step. It would not be long surely, before
fatigue overcame it: before it could lie down in the tomb
of some lost valley and die.
But for a space yet it must walk on, each step more
agonizingly slow than the last, while the night bloomed
black around its head.
Mick wanted to bury the car thief, somewhere on the
edge of the forest. Judd, however, pointed out that
burying a body might seem, in tomorrow’s saner light, a
little suspicious. And besides, wasn’t it absurd to concern themselves with one corpse when there were literally thousands of them lying a few miles from where they stood?
The body was left to lie, therefore, and the car to sink
deeper into the ditch.
They began to walk again.
It was cold, and colder by the moment, and they were
hungry. But the few houses they passed were all deserted,
locked and shuttered, every one.
“What did he mean?” said Mick, as they stood looking
at another locked door.
52
Clive Barker
“He was talking metaphor— ”
“All that stuff about giants?”
“ It was some Trotskyist tripe— ” Judd insisted.
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so. It was his deathbed speech, he’d probably
been preparing for years.”
“ I don’t think so,” Mick said again, and began walking
back towards the road.
“Oh, how’s that?” Judd was at his back.
“He wasn’t towing some party line.”
“Are you saying you think there’s some giant around
here someplace? For God’s sake!”
Mick turned to Judd. His face was difficult to see in the
twilight. But hi
s voice was sober with belief.
“Yes. I think he was telling the truth.”
“That’s absurd. That’s ridiculous. No.”
Judd hated Mick that moment. Hated his naivete, his
passion to believe any half-witted story if it had a whiff
of romance about it. And this? This was the worst, the
most preposterous . . .
“No,” he said again. “No. No. No.”
The sky was porcelain smooth, and the outline of the
hills black as pitch.
“I’m fucking freezing,” said Mick out of the ink. “Are
you staying here or walking with me?”
Judd shouted: “We’re not going to find anything this
way.”
“Well it’s a long way back.”
“We’re just going deeper into the hills.”
“Do what you like— I’m walking.”
His footsteps receded: the dark encased him.
After a minute, Judd followed.
The night was cloudless and bitter. They walked on, their
collars up against the chill, their feet swollen in their
shoes. Above them the whole sky had become a parade
of stars. A triumph of spilled light, from which the eye
In The Hills, The Cities
53
could make as many patterns as it had patience for. After
a while, they slung their tired arms around each other,
for comfort and warmth.
About eleven o’clock, they saw the glow of a window in
the distance.
The woman at the door of the stone cottage didn’t
smile, but she understood their condition, and let them
in. There seemed to be no purpose in trying to explain to
either the woman or her crippled husband what they had
seen. The cottage had no telephone, and there was no
sign of a vehicle, so even had they found some way to
express themselves, nothing could be done.
With mimes and face-pullings they explained that they
were hungry and exhausted. They tried further to explain that they were lost, cursing themselves for leaving their phrasebook in the VW. She didn’t seem to understand very much of what they said, but sat them down beside a blazing fire and put a pan of food on the stove to
heat.
They ate thick unsalted pea soup and eggs, and occasionally smiled their thanks at the woman. Her husband sat beside the lire, making no attempt to talk, or even
look at the visitors.
The food was good. It buoyed their spirits.
They would sleep until morning and then begin the
long trek back. By dawn the bodies in the field would be
being quantified, identified, parcelled up and dispatched
to their families. The air would be full of reassuring
noises, cancelling out the moans that still rang in their
ears. There would be helicopters, lorry loads of men
' organizing the clearing-up operations. All the rites and
paraphernalia of a civilized disaster.
And in a while, it would be palatable. It would become
part of their history: a tragedy, of course, but one they
could explain, classify and learn to live with. All would
be well, yes, all would be well. Come morning.
The sleep of sheer fatigue came on them suddenly.
54
Clive Barker
They lay where they had fallen, still sitting at the table,
their heads on their crossed arms. A litter of empty bowls
and bread crusts surrounded them.
They knew nothing. Dreamt nothing. Felt nothing.
Then the thunder began.
In the earth, in the deep earth, a rhythmical tread, as
of a titan, that came, by degrees, closer and closer.
The woman woke her husband. She blew out the lamp
and went to the door. The night sky was luminous with
stars: the hills black on every side.
The thunder still sounded: a full half minute between
every boom, but louder now. And louder with every new
step.
They stood at the door together, husband and wife,
and listened to the night-hills echo back and forth with
the sound. There was no lightning to accompany the
thunder.
Just the boom—
Boom—
Boom—
It made the ground shake: it threw dust down from the
door-lintel, and rattled the window-latches.
Boom—
Boom—
They didn’t know what approached, but whatever
shape it took, and whatever it intended, there seemed no
sense in running from it. Where they stood, in the pitiful
shelter of their cottage, was as safe as any nook of the
forest. How could they choose, out of a hundred thousand trees, which would be standing when the thunder had passed? Better to wait: and watch.
The wife’s eyes were not good, and she doubted what
she saw when the blackness of the hill changed shape and
reared up to block the stars. But her husband had seen it
too: the unimaginably huge head, vaster in the deceiving
darkness, looming up and up, dwarfing the hills themselves with ambition.
In The Hills, The Cities
55
He fell to his knees, babbling a prayer, his arthritic legs
twisted beneath him.
His wife screamed: no words she knew could keep this
monster at bay— no prayer, no plea, had power over it.
In the cottage, Mick woke and his outstretched arm,
twitching with a sudden cramp, wiped the plate and the
lamp off the table.
They smashed.
Judd woke.
The screaming outside had stopped. The woman had
disappeared from the doorway into the forest. Any tree,
any tree at all, was better than this sight. Her husband
still let a string of prayers dribble from his slack mouth,
as the great leg of the giant rose to take another step—
Boom—
The cottage shook. Plates danced and smashed off the
dresser. A clay pipe rolled from the mantelpiece and
shattered in the ashes of the hearth.
The lovers knew the noise that sounded in their
substance: that earth-thunder.
Mick reached for Judd, and took him by the shoulder.
“You see,” he said, his teeth blue-grey in the darkness
of the cottage. “See? See?”
There was a kind of hysteria bubbling behind his
words. He ran to the door, stumbling over a chair in
the dark. Cursing and bruised he staggered out into the
night—
Boom—
The thunder was deafening. This time it broke all
the windows in the cottage. In the bedroom one of the
roof-joists cracked and flung debris downstairs.
Judd joined his lover at the door. The old man was
now face down on the ground, his sick and swollen
fingers curled, his begging lips pressed to the damp soil.
Mick was looking up, towards the sky. Judd followed
his gaze.
There was a place that showed no stars. It was a
56
Clive Barker
darkness in the shape of a man, a vast, broad human
frame, a colossus that soared up to meet heaven. It was
not quite a perfect giant. Its outline was not tidy; it
seethed and swarmed.
He seemed broader too, this giant, than any real man.
His legs wer
e abnormally thick and stumpy, and his arms
were not long. The hands, as they clenched and unclenched, seemed oddly jointed and over-delicate for its torso.
Then it raised one huge, flat foot and placed it on the
earth, taking a stride towards them.
Boom—
The step brought the roof collapsing in on the cottage.
Everything that the car-thief had said was true. Popolac
was a city and a giant; and it had gone into the hills . . .
Now their eyes were becoming accustomed to the
night light. They could see in ever more horrible detail
the way this monster was constructed. It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women
and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and
strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their
muscles stretched to breaking point, their bones close to
snapping.
They could see how the architects of Popolac had
subtly altered the proportions of the human body; how
the thing had been made squatter to lower its center of
gravity; how its legs had been made elephantine to bear
the weight of the torso; how the head was sunk low on to
the wide shoulders, so that the problems of a weak neck
had been minimized.
Despite these malformations, it was horribly lifelike.
The bodies that were bound together to make its surface
were naked but for their harnesses, so that its surface
glistened in the starlight, like one vast human torso.
Even the muscles were well copied, though simplified.
They could see the way the roped bodies pushed and
In The Hills, The Cities
57
pulled against each other in solid cords of flesh and bone.
They could see the intertwined people that made up the
body: the backs like turtles packed together to offer the
sweep of the pectorals; the lashed and knotted acrobats
at the joints of the arms and the legs alike, rolling and
unwinding to articulate the city.
But surely the most amazing sight of all was the face.
Cheeks of bodies; cavernous eye-sockets in which
heads stared, five bound together for each eyeball; a
broad, flat nose and a mouth that opened and closed, as
the muscles of the jaw bunched and hollowed rhythmically. And from that mouth, lined with teeth of bald children, the voice of the giant, now only a weak copy of
its former powers, spoke a single note of idiot music.
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 7