by Clive Barker
“And the gallery didn’t mind?”
“They don’t know it’s gone,” Sabina said. “They put it in storage with all the other pictures they couldn’t sell. I guess they figured they’d find buyers sooner or later, but people don’t want pictures like Ted’s on their walls. They want stupid stuff.” She had come to Harry’s shoulder as she spoke. He could smell a light honey-scent off her. “If you like,” she said, “I could come back and make a new support for the canvas. Then you could hang it over your bed—” she slid him a sly look, “or wherever.”
Harry didn’t want to offend the girl. No doubt she’d done as Ted would have wished, bringing the picture here, but the notion of waking to an image of Wyckoff Street every morning wasn’t particularly comforting.
“I can see you want to think about it,” Sabina said, and leaning across to Harry laid a quick kiss beside his mouth. “I’ll stop by sometime next week, okay?” she said. “You can tell me then.” She finished her rum and handed the empty glass to Harry. “It was really nice meeting you,” she said, suddenly and sweetly formal. She was slowly retreating to the door as if waiting for a sign from Harry that she should stay.
He was tempted. But he knew he wouldn’t think much of himself in the morning if he took advantage. She was seventeen, for God’s sake. By Ted’s standards that was practically senile, of course. But there was a part of Harry that still wanted seventeen year olds to be dreaming of love, not being plied with rum and coaxed into bed by men twice their age.
She seemed to realize that nothing was going to come of this, and gave him a slightly quizzical smile. “You really aren’t the way I thought you’d be,” she remarked, faintly disappointed.
“I guess Ted didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.”
“Oh it wasn’t just Ted told me about you,” she said.
“Who else?”
“Everyone and no one,” she replied with a lazy shrug. She was at the door now. “See you, maybe,” she said, and opening the door was away, leaving him wishing he’d kept her company a little longer.
Later, as he trailed to the John at three in the morning, he halted in front of the painting, and wondered if Mimi Lomax’s house on Wyckoff Street was still standing. The question was still with him when he woke the following morning, and as he walked to his office, and as he sorted through his outstanding paperwork. It didn’t matter either way, of course, except to the extent that the question kept coming between him and his business. He knew why: he was afraid. Though he’d seen terrors in Palomo Grove, and come face to face with the lad itself in Everville, the specter of Wyckoff Street had never been properly exorcised. Perhaps it was time to do so now: to deal once and for all with that last corner of his psyche still haunted by the stale notion of an evil that coveted human souls.
He turned the notion over through the rest of the day, and through the day following that, knowing in his gut he would have to go sooner or later, or the subject would only gain authority over him.
On Friday morning, he got to his office to find that somebody had mailed him a mummified monkey’s head, elaborately mounted on what looked suspiciously like a length of human bone. It was not the first time he’d had such items come his way—some of them warnings, some of them talismans from well-wishers, some of them simply ill-advised gifts—but today the presence of this object, its aroma stinging his sinuses, seemed to Harry a goad, to get him on his way. What are you afraid of? the gaping thing seemed to demand. Things die, and spoil, but look, I’m laughing.
He boxed the thing up, and was about to deposit it in the trash when some superstitious nerve in him twitched. Instead he left it where it lay in the middle of his desk and, telling it he’d be back soon, he headed off to Wyckoff Street.
It was a cold day. Not yet New York-bitter (that was probably a month, six weeks from now), but cold enough to know that there’d be no more shirtsleeves days this side of winter. He didn’t mind. The summer months had always brought him the most trouble—this summer had been no exception—and he was relieved to feel things running down around him. So what if the trees shed, and the leaves rotted and the nights drew in? He needed the sleep.
He found that much of the neighborhood around Wyckoff Street had changed drastically since he’d last been here, and the closer he got the more he dared hope his destination would be so much rubble.
Not so. Wyckoff Street remained almost exactly as it had been ten years before, the houses as gray and grim as ever. Rock might melt in Oregon, and the sky crack like a dropped egg, but here earth was earth and sky was sky and whatever lived between was not going to be skipping anywhere soon.
He wandered along the littered sidewalk to Mimi Lomax’s house, expecting to find it in a state of dilapidation. Again, not so. Its present owner was plainly attentive. The house had a new roof, a new chimney, new eaves. The door he knocked on had been recently painted.
There was no reply at first, though he heard the murmur of voices from inside. He knocked again, and this time, after a delay of a minute or so, the door was opened a sliver and a woman in late middle-age, her face taut and sickly, stared out at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“Are you him?” she said. Her voice was frail with exhaustion. “Are you De Amour?”
“I’m D’Amour, yes.” Harry was already uneasy. He could smell the woman from where he stood; sour sweat and dirt. “How do you know who I am?” he asked her.
“She said—” the woman replied, opening the door a little wider.
“Who said?”
“She’s got my Stevie upstairs. She’s had him there for three days.” Tears were pouring down the woman’s cheeks as she spoke. She made no effort to wipe them away. “She said she wouldn’t let him go till you got here.” She stepped back from the door. “You gotta make her let him go. He’s all I got.”
Harry took a deep breath, and stepped into the house. At the far end of the hallway stood a woman in her early twenties. Long black hair, huge eyes shining in the gloom.
“This is Stevie’s sister. Loretta.”
The young woman clutched her rosary, and stared at Harry as though he was an accomplice of whatever was upstairs.
The older woman closed the front door and came to Harry’s side. “How did it know you were coming here?” she murmured.
“I don’t know,” Harry replied.
“It said if we tried to leave—” Loretta said, her voice barely a whisper, “it’d kill Stevie.”
“Why do you say it?”
“Because it’s not human.” She glanced up the flight, her face fearful. “It’s from Hell,” she breathed. “Can’t you smell it?”
There was certainly a foul smell. This wasn’t the fish-market stench of the Zyem Carasophia’s chamber. This was shit and fire.
Heart cavorting, Harry went to the bottom of the stairs. “You stay down here,” he told the two women, and started up the flight, stepping over the spot on the fifth stair where Father Hess’s head had been resting when he expired. There was no noise from upstairs, and none now from below. He climbed in silence, knowing the creature awaiting him was listening for every creaking stair. Rather than let it think he was attempting to approach in silence and failing, he broke the hush himself.
“Coming, ready or not,” he said.
The reply came immediately. And he knew within a syllable what thing this was.
“Harry—” said Lazy Susan. “Where have you been? No, don’t tell me. You’ve been seeing the Boss Man, haven’t you?”
While the demon talked, Harry reached the top of the stairs and crossed the landing to the door. The paint was blistered.
“You want a job, Harry?” Lazy Susan went on. “I don’t blame you. Times are about to get real bad.”
The door was already open an inch. Harry pushed it, lightly, and it swung wide. The room beyond was almost completely dark, the drapes drawn, the lamp on the floor so encrusted with caked excrement it barely glimmered. The bed itself had been stripped down to the matt
ress, which in turn had been burned black. On it lay a youth, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and boxer shorts, face-down.
“Stevie?” Harry said.
The boy didn’t move.
“He’s asleep right now,” said Lazy Susan’s curdled voice from the darkness beyond the bed. “He’s had a busy time.”
“Why don’t you just let the kid go? It’s me you want.”
“You overestimate your appeal, D’Amour. Why would I want a fuckedup soul like yours when I could have this pure little thing?”
“Then why did you bring me here?”
“I didn’t. Sure, Sabina may have planted the thought in your head. But you came of your own accord.”
“Sabina’s a friend of yours?”
“She’d probably prefer mistress. Did you fuck her?”
“No.”
“Ah, D’Amour!” the Nomad said, exasperated. “After all the trouble I went to getting her wet. You’re not turning queer on me, are you? No. You’re too straight for your own good. You’re boring, D’Amour. Boring, boring—”
“Well maybe I should just piss off home,” Harry said, turning back to the door.
There was a rush of motion behind him; he heard the bedsprings creak, and Stevie let out a little moan. “Wait,” the Nomad hissed. “Don’t you ever turn your back on me.”
He glanced over his shoulder. The creature had shimmied up onto the bed and now had its bone and muck body poised over its victim. It was the color of the filth on the lamp, but wet, its too-naked anatomy full of peristaltic motions.
“Why’s it always shit?” Harry said.
The Nomad cocked its head. Whatever features were upon it all resembled wounds. “Because shit’s all we have, Harry, until we’re returned to glory. It’s all God allows us to play with. Maybe a little fire, once in a while, as long as He isn’t looking. Speaking of fire, I saw Father Hess the other day, burning in his cell. I told him I might see you—”
Harry shook his head. “It doesn’t work, Nomad,” he said.
“What doesn’t work?”
“The fallen angel routine. I don’t believe it anymore.” He started toward the bed. “You know why? I saw some of your relatives in Oregon. In fact, I almost got crucified by a couple of them. Brutish little fucks like you, except they didn’t have any of your pretensions. They were just in it for the blood and the shit.” He kept approaching the bed as he talked, far from certain what the creature would do. It had disemboweled Hess with a few short strokes and he had no reason to believe it had lost the knack. But, stripped of its phony autobiography, what was it? A thug with a few days’ training in an abattoir.
“Stop right there,” the creature said when Harry was a yard from the bed. It was shuddering from head to foot. “If you come any closer, I’ll kill Little Stevie. And I’ll throw him down the stairs, just like Hess.”
Harry raised his hands in mock-surrender. “Okay,” he said, “this is as close as I get. I just wanted to check the family resemblance. You know, it’s uncanny.”
The Nomad shook his head. “I was an angel, D’Amour,” it said, its voice troubled. “I remember Heaven. I do. As though it were yesterday. Clouds and light and—”
“And the sea?”
“The sea?”
“Quiddity.”
“No!” it yelled. “I was in Heaven. I remember God’s heart, beating, beating, all the time—”
“Maybe you were born on a beach.”
“I’ve warned you once,” the creature said. “I’ll kill the boy.”
“And what will that prove? That you’re a fallen angel? Or that you’re the little bully I say you are?”
The Nomad raised its hands to its wretched face. “Ohh, you’re clever, D’Amour,” it sighed. “You’re very clever. But so was Hess.” The creature parted its fingers, exhaling its sewer breath. “And look what happened to him.”
“Hess wasn’t clever,” Harry said softly. “I loved him and I respected him, but he was deluded. You’re pretty much alike, now that I think about it.” He leaned an inch or two closer to the entity. “You think you fell from Heaven. He thought he was serving it. You believed the same things, in the end. It was stupid to kill him, Nomad. It’s not left you with very much.”
“I’ve still got you,” the creature replied. “I could fuck with your head until the Crack of Doom.”
“Nah,” Harry said, standing upright. “I’m not afraid of you any longer. I don’t need prayers—”
“Oh don’t you?” it growled.
“I don’t need a crucifix. I just need the eyes in my head. And what I see—what I see is an anorexic little shit-eater.”
At this, it launched itself at him, shrieking, all the wounds in its head wide. Harry retreated across the filthy floor, avoiding its whining talons by inches, until his back was flat against the wall. Then it closed on him, flinging its arms up at his head. He raised his hands to protect his eyes, but the creature didn’t want them, at least not yet. Instead it dug its fingers into the flesh at the back of his neck, driving its spiked feet into the wall to either side of his body.
“Now again, D’Amour—” the creature said. Harry felt the blood pour down his spine. Heard his vertebrae crack. “Am I an angel?” Its face was inches from Harry’s, its voice issuing from all the holes at once. “I want an answer, D’Amour. It’s very important to me. I was in Heaven once, wasn’t I? Admit it.”
Very, very slowly, Harry shook his throbbing head.
The creature sighed. “Oh, D’Amour,” it said, uprooting one of its hands from the back of Harry’s neck and bringing it round to stroke his larynx. The growl had gone from its voice. It was no longer the Nomad; it was Lazy Susan. “I’ll miss you,” it said, its fingers breaking the skin of Harry’s throat. “There hasn’t been a night when I haven’t thought of us”—its tone was sultry now—”here, in the dark together.”
On the bed behind the creature, the boy moaned.
“Hush …,” Lazy Susan said.
But Stevie was beyond being silenced. He wanted the comfort of a prayer. “Hail Mary, full of grace—” he began.
The creature glanced round at him, the Nomad surfacing again to shriek for the boy to shut the fuck up. As it did so, Harry caught hold of the hand at his neck, lacing his fingers with the talons. Then he threw his weight forward. The Nomad’s feet were loosed from the wall and the two bodies, locked together, stumbled into the middle of the room.
Instantly, the creature drove its fingers deeper into Harry’s nape. Blinded by pain, he swung around, determined that wherever they fell it wouldn’t be on top of the boy. They reeled wildly, round and round, until Harry lost his balance and fell forward, carrying the Nomad ahead of him.
Its body struck the charred door, which splintered under the combined weight of their bodies. Through his tear-filled eyes Harry glimpsed the misbegotten face in front of him, its hands slack with shock. Then they were out onto the landing. It was bright after the murk of the bedroom. For the Nomad, painfully so. It convulsed in Harry’s embrace, hot phlegm spurting from its maws. He seized the moment to wrest its talons from his neck, then their momentum carried them against the banisters, which cracked but did not break, and over they went.
It was a fall of perhaps ten feet, the Nomad under Harry, shrieking still. They hit the stairs, and rolled and rolled, finally coming to rest a few steps from the bottom.
The first thing Harry thought was: God, it’s quiet. Then he opened his eyes. He was cheek to cheek with the creature, its sweat stinging his skin. Reaching out for the spattered banister he started to haul himself to his feet, his left arm, shoulder, ribs and neck all paining him, but none so badly he could not enjoy the spectacle at his feet.
The Nomad was in extremis, its body—which was even more pitiful and repulsive by the light of day than in the room above—a mass of degenerating tissue.
“Are … you … there?” the creature said.
It had lost its growl and its silkiness too, as though the s
elves it had pretended had flickered out along with its sight.
“I’m here,” Harry replied.
It tried to raise one of its hands, but failed. “Are you … dying?” it wanted to know.
“Not today,” Harry said softly.
“That’s not right,” the creature said. “We have to go together. I … am … you …”
“You haven’t got much time,” Harry told it. “Don’t waste what you’ve got with that crap.”
“But it’s true,” the thing went on. “I am … I am you and … you are love …”
Harry thought of Ted’s painting; of the snake beneath his heel. Clinging to the banister, he raised his foot.
“Be quiet,” he said.
The creature ignored him. “You are love …,” it said again. “And love is …”
Harry laid his heel upon its head. “I’m warning you,” he said.
“Love is what …”
He didn’t warn it again, but ground his foot down into its suppurating face as hard as his weary body would allow. It was hard enough. He felt its muck cave in beneath his heel, layers of wafer-bone and ooze dividing under his weight. Small spasms ran out along the creature’s limbs to its bloodied fingertips. Then, quite suddenly, it ceased, its schtick unfinished.
In the hallway below, Loretta was murmuring the prayer her brother had begun above.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women—”
It sounded pretty to Harry’s ears, after the shrieks and the threats.
“And blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus—”
It would not turn death away, of course. It would not save the innocent from suffering. But prettiness was no insignificant quality, not in this troubled world.
While he listened he pulled his heel out of the Nomad’s face. The creature’s matter, stripped of the will that had shaped it, was already losing distinction and running off down the stairs.
