The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  The tree I’d seen born had spread its seeds in every direction. In a few seconds a forest had sprung up, its churning canopy as dark as a thunderhead. And flitting between the trees were all manner of creatures, rising to nest, falling to rot. Close by me, an antelope stood in the dapple, shitting itself in terror. I looked for the cause. There; a few yards from the creature, something moved between the trees. I glimpsed only the glint off its eye, or tooth, until it suddenly broke cover, and came at its prey in one vast bound. A tiger, the size of four or five men. The antelope made to dart away, but its hunter was too fast. The tiger’s claws sank into the antelope’s silken flank and finished its leap with its prey beneath it. The death wasn’t quick or pretty. The antelope thrashed wildly, though its body was torn wide open, and the tiger was tearing out its stringy throat. I didn’t look away. I watched until the antelope was steaming meat, and the tiger sank down to dine. Only then did my eyes wander in search of new distractions.

  There was something bright between the trees, I saw; brighter by the moment. Like a fire in its appetite, it climbed through the canopy as it approached, its advance above outpacing its steadier progress below. There was chaos in the thicket, as every species—hunter and hunted alike—fled before the blaze. But above me there was no escape. The fire came too fast, consuming birds in their flight, the chicks in their nests, monkeys and squirrels on the bough. Countless corpses fell around me, blackened and smoking. White hot ash came with them, powdering the ground.

  I wasn’t in fear for my life. By now I knew enough about this place to be confident of my immunity. But the scene appalled me nevertheless. What was I witnessing? Some primal cataclysm that had scoured this world? Undone it from sky to ground? If so, what was its source? This was no natural disaster, I was certain of that. The blaze above me had made itself into a kind of roof, creating in the moment of destruction a fretted vault, in which the dying were immortalized in fire. Tears started into my eyes, the sight moved me so. I reached to brush them out, so as not to miss whatever new glories or horrors were imminent, and as I did so I heard in my heart the first human utterance—other than my own noise—to come my way since I’d entered this chamber.

  It was not a word; or if it was it was no word I knew. But it had meaning; at least that was my belief. To my ear it sounded like an open-throated shout raised by some newborn soul in the midst of the blaze; a yell of celebration and defiance. Here I am! it seemed to say. Now we begin!

  I raised myself up on my hands to see if I could find the shouter (whether it was man or woman I couldn’t yet decide) but the rain of ash and detritus was like a veil before me: I could see almost nothing through it.

  My arms could not support me for more than a few moments. But as I sank back down to the ground, frustrated, the fire overhead—having perhaps exhausted its fuel—went out. The ash ceased falling. And there, standing no more than twenty yards from where I lay, the blaze surrounding her like a vast, fiery flower, was Cesaria. There was nothing about her attitude or her expression that suggested the fire threatened her. Far from it. She seemed rather to be luxuriating in its touch; her hands moving over her body as the conflagration bathed it, as though to be certain its balm penetrated every pore. Her hair, which was even blacker than her skin, flickered and twitched; her breasts seeped milk, her eyes ran silvery tears, her sex, which now and then she fingered, issued streams of blood.

  I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. She was too exquisite, too ripe. It seemed to me that all I had seen before me in the last little while—the laval ground, the tree and its fruit, the pale herd, the hunted antelope and the tiger that took it; even the strange, winged creature that had briefly appeared in my vision—all of these were in and of the woman before me. She was their maker and their slaughterer; the sea into which they flowed and the rock from which they’d sprung.

  I’d seen enough, I decided. I’d drunk down all I could bear to drink, and still keep my sanity. It was time I turned my back on these visions, and retreated to the safety of the mundane. I needed time to assimilate what I’d seen—and the thoughts that the sights had engendered.

  But retreat was no easy business. Ungluing my eyes from the sight of my father’s wife was hard enough; but when I did so, and looked back toward the door, I could not find it. The illusion surrounded me on every side; there was no hint of the real remaining. For the first time since the visions had begun I remembered Luman’s talk of madness, and I was seized with panic. Had I carelessly let my hold on sanity slip, without even noticing that I’d done so? Was I now adrift in this illusion with no solid ground left for my senses?

  I remembered with a shudder the crib in which Luman had been bound; and the look of unappeasable rage in his eyes. Was that all that lay before me now? A life without certainty, without solidity; this forest a prison I’d breathed into being, and that other world, where I’d been real and in my wounded fashion content, now a dream of freedom to which I could not return?

  I closed my eyes to shut out the illusion. Like a child in terror, I prayed.

  “Oh Lord God in Heaven, look down on your servant at this moment; I beg of you … I need you with me.

  “Help me. Please. Take these things out of my head. I don’t want them, Lord. I don’t want them.”

  Even as I whispered my prayer I felt a rush of energies against me. The blaze between the trees, which had come to a halt a little distance from me, was on the move again. I hastened my prayer, certain that if the fire was coming for me, then so was Cesaria.

  “Save me, Lord—”

  She was coming to silence me. That was my sudden conviction. She was a part of my insanity and she was coming to hush the words I’d uttered to defend myself against it.

  “Lord, please hear me—”

  The energies intensified, as though they intended to snatch the words away from my lips.

  “Quickly, Lord, quickly! Show me the way out of here! Please! God in Heaven, help me!”

  “Hush …,” I heard Cesaria say. She was right behind me. It seemed to me I could feel the small hairs at the nape of my neck fizzle and fry. I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder. There she was, still cocooned in fire, her dark flesh shining. My mouth was suddenly parched; I could barely speak.

  “I want …,”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back.”

  “Yes …,” I said. I was close to sobbing.

  “But here it is,” she said. “All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it’s yours.”

  “No,” I protested. “I’ve never been in this place before.”

  “But it’s been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were born.”

  “Dreamed it into me …,” I said.

  “Every sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come … it’s in your blood and in your bowels.”

  “Then why am I so afraid of it?”

  “Because you’ve held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you’re the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you …”

  Did I dare believe any of this?

  Cesaria replied as though she’d heard the doubt spoken aloud.

  “I can’t reassure you,” she said. “Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you’ve ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again.”

  “Fall where?”

  “Why back into your own hands, of course,” she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn’t blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I’d never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that: I was afraid.

  “Ask your question,” Cesaria said. “You have a que
stion. Ask it.”

  “It sounds so childish.”

  “Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it.”

  “Am I … safe?”

  “Safe?”

  “Yes. Safe.”

  “In your flesh? No. I can’t guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there’re other hands to hold you. I’ve told you that already.”

  “And … I think I believe you,” I said.

  “So then,” Cesaria said, “you have no reason not to let the memories come.”

  She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.

  “Touch me,” she said.

  I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said to me. “They don’t bite.”

  I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn’t bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn’t realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can’t imagine how that’s possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.

  I don’t believe I had ever stood so close to my father’s wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush and forbidding. Strands of her hair were lifted by gusts off the blaze around us (to the heat of which I seemed invulnerable) and brushed against my cheek. Their touch, though it was light, was nevertheless profoundly sensual. Feeling it, and seeing her exquisite features, I could not help but imagine what it would be like to be received into her arms. To kiss her, to lie with her, to put a child into her. It was little wonder my father had obsessed on her to his dying day, though all manner of argument and disappointment had soured the love between them.

  “So now …,” she said.

  “Yes?” I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.

  “Take it back …,” she said.

  I didn’t comprehend what she was telling me. “Take what back?” I said.

  “The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back.”

  I understood. It was time to repossess all that I’d attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I’d hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.

  “Take it back.”

  I wanted to beg a few moments’ grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.

  “Take it back,” she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat, and lungs in an instant.

  My head reeled; white blotches burned at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.

  The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up—hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.

  What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I’d first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father’s wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.

  From Everville

  In sleep, Tesla found herself walking on an unearthly shore. Snow had lately fallen there, but she felt none of its chill. Light-footed, she wandered down to the sea. It was thick and dark, its turbulent waters scummy, and here and there she saw bodies in the surf, turning their stricken faces her way as if to warn her against entering.

  She had no choice. The sea wanted her, and would not be denied. Nor, in truth, did she want to resist it. The shore was drear and desolate. The sea, for all its freight of corpses, was a place of mystery.

  It was only once she was wading into the surf, the waves breaking against her breasts and her belly, that her dreaming mind put words to what place this was. Or rather, one word.

  Quiddity.

  The dream-sea leaped up against her face when she spoke its name, and its undertow pulled at her legs. She didn’t attempt to fight it, but let it lift her off her feet and carry her away like an eager lover. The waves, which were substantial enough at the shore, soon grew titanic. When they raised her up on their shoulders she could see a wall of darkness at the horizon, the likes of which she remembered from her last moments in Kissoon’s Loop. The lad, of course. Mountains and fleas; fleas and mountains. When they dropped her into their troughs, and she plunged below the surface, she glimpsed another spectacle entirely: vast shoals of fish, moving like thunderheads below her. And weaving between the shoals, luminous forms that were, she guessed, human spirits like herself. She seemed to see vestigial faces in their light; hints of the infants, lovers, and dying souls who were dreaming themselves here.

  She had no doubt as to which of the three she was. Too old to be a baby, too crazy to be a lover, there was only one reason why her soul was journeying here tonight. Miss Perfection had been right. Death was imminent. This was the last time she would sleep before her span as Tesla Bombeck was over.

  Even if she’d been distressed at this, she had no time to feel it. The adventure at hand demanded too much of her attention. Rising and falling, on shoulder and in trough, she was carried on toward a place where the waters, for some reason she could not comprehend, grew so utterly calm they made an almost perfect mirror for the busy sky.

  She thought at first she was alone in these doldrums, and was about to test her powers of self-propulsion in order escape them, when she realized that a light was flickering beneath her. She looked down into the water, and saw that some species of fish with luminous flesh had congregated in the deep, and was now steadily rising toward the surface. When she raised her head from the water again she found that she was not alone. A long-haired, bearded man was casually crouching on the water as though it were as solid as a rock, idly creating ripples in the glassy surface. He had been there all along, she assumed, and she’d missed him. But now, as if roused from some reverie by her gaze, he looked up.

  His face was scrawny—his bones sharp, his black eyes sharper—but the smile he offered was so sweetly tentative, as though he was a little embarrassed to have been caught unawares, that she was instantly charmed. He rose, the water dancing around his feet, and ambled over to her. His water-soaked robes were in tatters, and she could see that his torso was covered with small, pale scars, as though he’d been wrestling in broken glass.

  She sympath
ized with his condition. She too was scarred, inside and out; she too had been stripped of all she’d worn in the world: her profession, her self-esteem, her certainty.

  “Do we know each other?” he said to her as he approached. His voice lacked music, but she liked the sound of it nevertheless.

  “No,” she said, suddenly tongue-tied. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Somebody spoke of you to me, I’m certain. Was it Fletcher perhaps?”

  “You know Fletcher?”

  “Then it was,” the man said, smiling again. “You’re the one who martyred him.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way—but yes, I guess that was me.”

  “You see?” he said. He went down on his haunches beside her, while the water buoyed her up. “You wanted connections, and they’re there to be found. But you have to look in the terrible places, Tesla. The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that’s where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair.”

  “I’ve tried to be brave,” she said.

  “I know,” he said softly. “I know.”

  “But I wasn’t brave enough, is that what you’re saying? The thing is, I didn’t ask to be part of this. I wasn’t ready for it. I was just going to write movies, you know, and get rich and smug. I guess that sounds pathetic to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose you get to see a lot of movies.”

  “You’d be surprised,” the man said with a little smile. “Anyway, it’s the stories that matter, however they’re told.”

  She thought of the child at the crossroads—

  We saw your face, and we said: She knows about the story tree.