The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  But also I remember the little library in Allerton Road; and the adventure of going there. The smell of old books; the covetousness that seized me when I found something new; the sense, when I got home and sat down to read, of a new world opening up. There is an intimacy in reading, of course, that is the essence of experience. The reader is being personally addressed by the author, mind to mind. That intimacy was a major part of what drew me to books. They made me feel connected to something beyond the limits of my life, the city, my schooling. My perception of language changed as I devoured the volumes I borrowed. Words were no longer to be taken for granted. Chosen and arranged with care, they were like spells. They could make things appear to me; pictures and feelings. I began to remember some of these enchantments by heart, as defenses against the dull world: sentences from a favorite novel, or more often, poems. I favored tight rhyme schemes over free verse. Not only were they easier to remember, their incantatory power was stronger. “In Midnights of November” by A. E. Housman, for instance; Stevenson’s “Requiem,” John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever”: “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”

  As my tastes widened, and my grasp of how poetry worked deepened, my choice of pieces to be committed to memory became more ambitious. Chunks of Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost; even bits of Eliot. Often I had at best a partial understanding of the meaning, but the music in these pieces was enough. I felt protected by what I had remembered; I repeated them quietly to myself when the world got too much for me.

  The incantations were transforming me, by degrees. I became more certain of myself; and more certain that I would be capable of making changes in the world, when my time came.

  That, in a sense, is the greatest source of optimism we can have as children: to believe that we will be able to change things, when our turn comes.

  IX

  A final story.

  In order to make the selection for this book, I took copies of all my plays, novels, and short stories away with me to my home in Hawaii; to the Garden Island of Kaua’i. I hadn’t intended to do much more than glance through them, but my sleep patterns were oddly disturbed when I got to the island, so I found myself waking a little before dawn, lighting a fire, making some tea, and working for a few hours before the household rose. After some initial trepidation about returning to old prose, I found myself enjoying the process, digging through the novels to find nuggets that I deemed “essential.” As I did so, I made notes for this introduction, some of which, in hindsight, almost read like tiny stories themselves: “I’m like a man who’s hired to break into his own house, who finds—much to his astonishment—that he’s asleep in his own bed.”

  Some were simply lists of things that enchanted me, work that carried the unmistakable stamp of profound imagining: Max Ernst’s forests; also Of This Men Shall Know Nothing; opening of Korda’s Thief of Baghdad, Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation, Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus …

  I made several such lists; attempts, I suppose, to see myself more clearly by naming the things that had given me inspiration.

  So, that was my work, between five and eight-thirty every morning. The only sounds were those of the sea (the house is twenty yards from the water), and sometimes the January rains lashing against the roof of our house. These were wonderful, even magical, times.

  A little after dawn one day, I had a visitor. A woman I didn’t know, who came knocking on the door, visibly distressed. She was sorry to be bothering me so early, she said, but did I have a large container of some kind: maybe a laundry bin or its like? I asked her what she needed it for, and she told me that her husband had found a baby dolphin stranded in the shallows a little way along the shore. It was hurt, and needed to be taken out of the water before any further harm came to it. I could find nothing to the purpose, but went with the woman down the beach. Her husband had gone back to their house to see if he could get the police to come out and help or at least to get some advice; the animal was floating in the surf, buffeted by wave after wave. He was tiny—no more than two, perhaps two-and-a-half, feet long—and he was audibly distressed. When I waded in and attempted to comfort him, the sounds he made were uncannily like the cries of a baby. I examined him as best I could, as the waves came in against us. The night had been exceptionally stormy, and the infant dolphin had plainly been thrown up against the rocks in the bay repeatedly. He had open gashes on his head and snout. I have seldom felt so ignorant and powerless. What were we to do? Bring the creature up out of the water where he wouldn’t be knocked about by the waves, or leave him in his native element? The woman and I debated for a minute or two, then compromised. I lifted the animal out on to the sand to see just how bad his wounds were, and then, having made a perfunctory examination, carried him back into the shallows. He had no energy left, he simply lay in my arms, buoyed by the water but protected from the worst assaults of the waves. We talked to him, we stroked him, and by degrees his mewling cries ceased. I kept looking at his bright black eyes, wondering what he saw when he looked at me; wondering what he imagined me to be. We stayed there together for half an hour or so; me cradling him in the water, the woman standing in the shallows close by. At last he died. It was my companion who realized it, not me. “I think we lost him,” she said quietly. I lifted the dolphin out of the water. I said I could feel his heart beating. She gently pointed out that it was my own pulse I was feeling, not his. She was right. Fatigue—and, who knows, perhaps despair?—had claimed him.

  We laid him on the sand, and sat with him silently for a few minutes. Then I picked him up and carried him back to the woman’s house. Later, she came to report that a man from the Marine Research Unit on the island, who had been alerted by her husband, had come out to collect the body. He’d ascertained several things. First, that the animal was not diseased (apparently diseased animals often deliberately beach themselves); second, that the dolphin was barely twenty-four-hours old, and had not even fed in his short life, which suggested that his mother had been taken by a shark, or that they had somehow become separated, and the infant had been carried to the shore, where he had been powerless to resist being thrown against the rocks. The man was happy that we’d reported the situation, because the animal was not, as we’d thought, a spinner dolphin (a species which is much in evidence around the islands, often close to shore) but a striped dolphin; altogether rarer, and much less studied. He was surprised, he said, that the animal had been washed up: they were thought to live in much deeper waters.

  That, in a sense, is the end of the story. I suppose it’s more anecdote than story. But it belongs here, I think. For the next few days, as I went on reading and reflecting, my thoughts returned over and over to the time I had been with the infant. The memory of holding his silky, wounded body in my arms moved me deeply: he was utterly strange to me, and I to him, no doubt. I tried to imagine what the creature must have been feeling—though of course it was an exercise in futility to try to do so. Still I kept coming back to the brightness of his eyes, to the pitifulness of his mewling. What a world to have been delivered into! One moment you’re safe in your mother’s womb, the next you’re expelled from her, then separated from her, and driven up onto a shore, where two creatures tend you, whisper to you in a language you cannot understand, and hold you until you die. Was I being too much the sentimentalist, to think that our words and touches had comforted the creature at the last? Were we in truth so alien to him that what we intended as solace was just another terror? I want to believe that there are signs that all living things understand; at least all mammals. That he knew there was gentleness in our touch and concern in our voices; and that that went some little way to easing his death.

  The sea plays a significant role in the books I’ve written. Quiddity, the dream-sea which lies at the heart of The Great and Secret
Show and Everville, is presented as a source of all mythologies, and finally perhaps, the source of consciousness itself. In Imajica the rise of the Goddesses at the end of the novel is signaled by an invasion of water, which playfully but irrevocably undoes the labors of God and His Kings. In Galilee, of course, the eponymous hero is a lonely seafarer, who chooses not to set foot on solid ground except when his responsibilities require it. He always comes to the same place when he makes landfall. The same island, the same beach. It is, of course, the beach I have been describing. Though I moved its location a mile or two to preserve the anonymity of the little bay where we spend a few weeks each year, it is the very place where I knelt in the surf with the dolphin.

  X

  We all live in separate worlds.

  The man watching the fire may be standing just a few yards from the man consumed by it, but his experience of the world is utterly different. At various points in our lives we all feel like the one who’s watching the flames; at other times, we feel like the one burning. Then we find ourselves looking out through the waves of heat and wondering how it’s possible for anyone to laugh, or look at the sky, or simply breathe.

  The challenge is this: how do we remember, when we’re out in the cool air, and our breath is easy, what it feels like in the fire? How do we extend our intellects, our emotions, our sympathies from one place into another; in fact, into many others? This is the defining business of the imagination: how to be other than ourselves, and in that experience look back at what we are, and know ourselves better. It is Terence, the great Roman dramatist, who offers the nicest summary of this adventure. “Humani nil a me alienum puto,” he says: Nothing human is alien to me. The traditions of storytelling and picturemaking which I’ve been celebrating here press beyond Terence’s profound humanism. They invite us not only to understand what it feels like to be another human being, but what it feels like to be another species entirely. To play in the Bestiary, openhearted. The realist objects that there is no merit in this: what does it matter, he protests, that a story takes us into the condition of invented beasts? The answer is this: that we are all invented beasts, all pieces of fiction, suspended in the solution of mind, and to keep a certain sense of that fact as we go about the hard business of daily life is to be more alive, more protean, more open to the possibility of flow. Sometimes we hope to flow into the pain of someone we know, and diminish it. Sometimes into the refreshing strangeness of a bird, or a dog. And finally, perhaps, we may flow out from our own narrowness completely, and be returned to the sea.

  Clive Barker

  LOS ANGELES

  MARCH 1999

  ONE

  DOORWAYS

  We pass through doorways all the time; they’re so familiar to us we fail to appreciate their mythic resonance. In the language of the fantastic, doorways present the reader with passage into other worlds, other times, other states of being. The most widely known example is probably in the film of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy tentatively opens the door of her house and discovers that she has been living in a black and white world, and that the experience that awaits her on the other side is rainbow-colored. What more perfect analogy for the power of the imagination?

  In the chapter that follows there are very few literal doorways; but all the selections describe moments when a character discovers that the rules of the world are changing in front of his or her eyes. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  Cal Mooney topples from the wall of a yard and falls into an enchanted carpet. Private detective Harry D’Amour stumbles into a place of passage between this world and Quiddity, the dream-sea. A boy called Will Rabjohns discovers that killing a living thing is also a doorway; a place in the world where everything changes. This, of course, is the reverse of the scene from Oz. Some color goes out of the world when Will is taught to kill.

  Most of the journeys these characters are about to take are outlandish. But the experience isn’t completely remote from us, is it? We’ve all crossed a threshold or turned a corner and come upon some revelation that has changed our lives. A face to fall in love with; a library filled with undiscovered books; a doctor, making a small, sad smile as he rises to beckon us in …

  From Weaveworld

  The birds did not stop their spiraling over the city as Cal approached. For every one that flew off, another three or four joined the throng. The phenomenon had not gone unnoticed. People stood on the pavement and on doorsteps, hands shading their eyes from the glare of the sky, and stared heavenward. Opinions were everywhere ventured as to the reason for this congregation. Cal didn’t stop to offer his, but threaded his way through the maze of streets, on occasion having to double back and find a new route, but by degrees getting closer to the hub.

  And now, as he approached, it became apparent that his first theory had been incorrect. The birds were not feeding. There was no swooping nor squabbling over a six-legged crumb, nor any sign in the lower air of the insect life that might have attracted these numbers. The birds were simply circling. Some of the smaller species, sparrows and finches, had tired of flying and now lined rooftops and fences, leaving their larger brethren — carrion-crows, magpies, gulls—to occupy the heights. There was no scarcity of pigeons here either; the wild variety banking and wheeling in flocks of fifty or more, their shadows rippling across the rooftops. There were some domesticated birds too, doubtless escapees like 33. Canaries and budgerigars: birds called from their millet and their bells by whatever force had summoned the others. For these birds being here was effectively suicide. Though their fellows were at present too excited by this ritual to take note of the pets in their midst, they would not be so indifferent when the circling spell no longer bound them. They would be cruel and quick. They’d fall on the canaries and the budgerigars and peck out their eyes, killing them for the crime of being tamed.

  But for now, the parliament was at peace. It mounted the air, higher, ever higher, busying the sky.

  The pursuit of this spectacle had led Cal to a part of the city he’d seldom explored. Here the plain square houses of the council estates gave way to a forlorn and eerie no-man’s-land, where streets of once-fine, three-story terraced houses still stood, inexplicably preserved from the bulldozer, surrounded by areas leveled in expectation of a boomtime that had never come; islands in a dust sea.

  It was one of these streets—Rue Street the sign read—that seemed the point over which the flocks were focused. There were more sizable assemblies of exhausted birds here than in any of the adjacent streets; they twittered and preened themselves on the eaves and chimney tops and television aerials.

  Cal scanned sky and roof alike, making his way along Rue Street as he did so. And there—a thousand-to-one chance—he caught sight of his bird. A solitary pigeon, dividing a cloud of sparrows. Years of watching the sky, waiting for pigeons to return from races, had given him an eagle eye; he could recognize a particular bird by a dozen idiosyncrasies in its flight pattern. He had found 33; no doubt of it. But even as he watched, the bird disappeared behind the roofs of Rue Street.

  He gave chase afresh, finding a narrow alley which cut between the terraced houses halfway along the road, and let on to the larger alley that ran behind the row. It had not been well kept. Piles of household refuse had been dumped along its length; orphan dustbins overturned, their contents scattered.

  But twenty yards from where he stood there was work going on. Two removal men were maneuvering an armchair out of the yard behind one of the houses, while a third stared up at the birds. Several hundred were assembled on the yard walls and windowsills and railings. Cal wandered along the alley, scrutinizing this assembly for pigeons. He found a dozen or more among the multitude, but not the one he sought.

  “What d’you make of it?”

  He had come within ten yards of the removal men, and one of them, the idler, was addressing the question to him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly.

  “Maybe they’re goin’ to migrate,” said the yo
unger of the two armchair carriers, letting drop his half of the burden and staring up at the sky.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Shane,” said the other man, a West Indian. His name—Gideon—was emblazoned on the back of his overalls. “Why’d they migrate in the middle of the fuckin’ summer?”

  “Too hot,” was the idler’s reply. “That’s what it is. Too fuckin’ hot. It’s cookin’ their brains up there.”

  Gideon had now put down his half of the armchair and was leaning against the backyard wall, applying a flame to the half-spent cigarette he’d fished from his top pocket.

  “Wouldn’t be bad, would it?” he mused. “Being a bird. Gettin’ yer end away all spring, then fuckin’ off to the South of France as soon as yer get a chill on yer bollocks.”

  “They don’t live long,” said Cal.

  “Do they not?” said Gideon, drawing on his cigarette. He shrugged. “Short and sweet,” he said. “That’d suit me.”

  Shane plucked at the half-dozen blond hairs of his would-be mustache. “Yer know somethin’ about birds, do yer?” he said to Cal.

  “Only pigeons.”

  “Race ‘em, do you?”

  “Once in a while—”

  “Me brother-in-law keeps whippets,” said the third man, the idler. He looked at Cal as though this coincidence verged on the miraculous, and would now fuel hours of debate. But all Cal could think of to say was:

  “Dogs.”

  “That’s right,” said the other man, delighted that they were of one accord on the issue. “He’s got five. Only one died.”

  “Pity,” said Cal.

  “Not really. It was fuckin’ blind in one eye and couldn’t see in the other.”

  The man guffawed at this observation, which promptly brought the exchange to a dead halt. Cal turned his attention back to the birds, and he grinned to see—there on the upper window-ledge of the house— his bird.