by Clive Barker
Now he saw the same dispassion and frugality in Billy. Like a man in training to cross a waterless wasteland and too possessive of his energies to squander them in a single fruitless gesture, the boy was sinking into himself. It was eerie; Cleve became increasingly uncomfortable sharing the twelve feet by eight of the cell with Billy. It was like living with a man on Death Row.
The only consolation was the tranquillisers, which Billy readily charmed the doctor into continuing to supply. They guaranteed Cleve sleep that was restful, and, for several days at least, dreamless.
And then he dreamt the city.
Not the city first; first the desert. An empty expanse of blue-black sand, which stung the soles of his feet as he walked, and was blown up by a cool wind into his nose and eyes and hair. He had been here before, he knew. His dream-self recognized the vista of barren dunes, with neither tree nor habitation to break the monotony. But on previous visits he had come with guides (or such was his half-formed belief); now he was alone, and the clouds above his head were heavy and slate-grey, promising no sun. For what seemed hours he walked the dunes, his feet turned bloody by the sharp sand, his body, dusted by the grains, tinged blue. As exhaustion came close to defeating him, he saw ruins, and approached them.
It was no oasis. There was nothing in those empty streets of health or sustenance; no fruitful trees nor sparkling fountains. The city was a conglomeration of houses, or parts of same - sometimes entire floors, sometimes single rooms - thrown down side by side in parodies of urban order. The styles were a hopeless mish-mash - fine Georgian establishments standing beside mean tenement buildings with rooms burnt out; a house plucked from a terraced row, perfect down to the glazed dog on the window sill, back to back with a penthouse suite. All were scarred by a rough removal from their context: walls were cracked, offering sly glimpses into private interiors; staircases beetled cloudward without destination; doors flapped open and closed in the wind, letting on to nowhere.
There was life here, Cleve knew. Not just the lizards, rats and butterflies - albinoes all - that fluttered and skipped in front of him as he walked the forsaken streets - but human life. He sensed that every step he took was overlooked, though he saw no sign of human presence; not on his first visit at least.
On the second, his dream-self forsook the trudge across the wilderness and was delivered directly into the necropolis, his feet, easily tutored, following the same route as he had on his first visit. The constant wind was stronger tonight. It caught the lace curtains in this window, and a tinkling Chinese trinket hanging in that. It carried voices too; horrid and outlandish sounds that came from some distant place far beyond the city. Hearing that whirring and whittering, as of insane children, he was grateful for the streets and the rooms, for their familiarity if not for any comfort they might offer. He had no desire to step into those interiors, voices or no; did not want to discover what marked these snatches of architecture out that they should have been ripped from their roots and flung down in this whining desolation.
Yet, once he had visited the site, his sleeping mind went back there, night upon night; always walking, bloody-footed, seeing only the rats and the butterflies, and the black sand on each threshold, blowing into rooms and hallways that never changed from visit to visit; that seemed, from what he could glimpse between the curtains or through a shattered wall, to have been fixed somehow at some pivotal moment, with a meal left uneaten on a table set for three (the capon uncarved, the sauces steaming), or a shower left running in a bathroom in which the lamp perpetually swung; and in a room that might have been a lawyer's study a lap-dog, or else a wig torn off and flung to the floor, lying discarded on a fine carpet whose intricacies were half-devoured by sand.
Only once did he see another human being in the city: and that was Billy. It happened strangely. One night - as he dreamed the streets - he half-stirred from sleep. Billy was awake, and standing in the middle of the cell, staring up at the light through the window. It was not moonlight, but the boy bathed in it as if it were. His face was turned up to the window, mouth open and eyes closed. Cleve barely had time to register the trance the boy seemed to be in before the tranquillisers drew him back into his dream. He took a fragment of reality with him however, folding the boy into his sleeping vision. When he reached the city again, there was Billy Tait: standing on the street, his face turned up to the louring clouds, his mouth open, his eyes closed.
The image lingered a moment only. The next, the boy was away, his heels kicking up black fans of sand. Cleve called after him. Billy ran on however, heedless; and, with that inexplicable foreknowledge that dreams bring, Cleve knew where the boy was going. Off to the edge of the city, where the houses petered out and the desert began. Off to meet some friend coming in on that terrible wind, perhaps. Nothing would induce him into pursuit, yet he didn't want to lose contact with the one fellow human he had seen in these destitute streets. He called Billy's name again, more loudly.
This time he felt a hand on his arm, and started up in terror to find himself being jostled awake in his cell.
'It's all right,' Billy said. 'You're dreaming.'
Cleve tried to shake the city out of his head, but for several perilous seconds the dream bled into the waking world, and looking down at the boy he saw Billy's hair lifted by a wind that did not, could not, belong in the confines of the cell. 'You're dreaming,' Billy said again. 'Wake up.'
Shuddering, Cleve sat fully up on his bunk. The city was receding - was almost gone - but before he lost sight of it entirely he felt the indisputable conviction that Billy knew what he was waking Cleve from; that they had been there together for a few, fragile moments.
'You know, don't you?' he accused the pallid face at his side.
The boy looked bewildered. 'What are you talking about?'
Cleve shook his head. The suspicion became more incredible with each step he took from sleep. Even so, when he looked down at Billy's bony hand, which still clung to his arm, he half-expected to see flecks of that obsidian grit beneath his finger-nails. There was only dirt.
The doubts lingered however, long after reason should have bullied them into surrender. Cleve found himself watching the boy more closely from that night on, waiting for some slip of tongue or eye which would reveal the nature of his game. Such scrutiny was a lost cause. The last traces of accessibility disappeared after that night; the boy became - like Rosanna - an indecipherable book, letting no clue as to the nature of his secret world out from beneath his lids. As to the dream - it was not even mentioned again. The only roundabout allusion to that night was Billy's redoubled insistence that Cleve continue to take the sedatives.
'You need your sleep,' he said after coming back from the Infirmary with a further supply. 'Take them.'
'You need sleep too,' Cleve replied, curious to see how far the boy would push the issue. 'I don't need the stuff any more.'
'But you do,' Billy insisted, proffering the phial of capsules. 'You know how bad the noise is.'
'Someone said they're addictive,' Cleve replied, not taking the pills, 'I'll do without.'
'No,' said Billy; and now Cleve sensed a level of insistence which confirmed his deepest suspicions. The boy wanted him drugged, and had all along. 'I sleep like a babe,' Billy said. 'Please take them. They'll only be wasted otherwise.'
Cleve shrugged. 'If you're sure,' he said, content - fears confirmed - to make a show of relenting.
'I'm sure.'
Then thanks.' He took the phial.
Billy beamed. With that smile, in a sense, the bad times really began.
That night, Cleve answered the boy's performance with one of his own, appearing to take the tranquillisers as he usually did, but failing to swallow them. Once lying on his bunk, face to the wall, he slipped them from his mouth, and under his pillow. Then he pretended sleep.
Prison days both began and finished early; by 8.45 or 9.00 most of the cells in the four wings were in darkness, the inmates locked up until dawn and left to their own d
evices. Tonight was quieter than most. The weeper in the next cell but one had been transferred to D Wing; there were few other disturbances along the landing. Even without the pill Cleve felt sleep tempting him. From the bunk below he heard practically no sound, except for the occasional sigh. It was impossible to guess if Billy was actually asleep or not. Cleve kept his silence, occasionally stealing a moment-long glance at the luminous face of his watch. The minutes were leaden, and he feared, as the first hours crept by, that all too soon his imitation of sleep would become the real thing. Indeed he was turning this very possibility around in his mind when unconsciousness overcame him.
He woke much later. His sleep-position seemed not to have altered. The wall was in front of him, the peeled paint like a dim map of some nameless territory. It took him a minute or two to orient himself. There was no sound from the bunk below. Disguising the gesture as one made in sleep, he drew his arm up within eye-range, and looked at the pale-green dial of his watch. It was one-fifty-one. Several hours yet until dawn. He lay in the position he'd woken in for a full quarter of an hour, listening for every sound in the cell, trying to locate Billy. He was loathe to roll over and look for himself, for fear that the boy was standing in the middle of the cell as he had been the night of the visit to the city.
The world, though benighted, was far from silent. He could hear dull footsteps as somebody paced back and forth in the corresponding cell on the landing above; could hear water rushing in the pipes and the sound of a siren on the Caledonian Road. What he couldn't hear was Billy. Not a breath of the boy.
Another quarter of an hour passed, and Cleve could feel the familiar torpor closing in to reclaim him; if he lay still much longer he would fall asleep again, and the next thing he'd know it would be morning. If he was going to learn anything, he had to roll over and look. Wisest, he decided, not to attempt to move surreptitiously, but to turn over as naturally as possible. This he did, muttering to himself, as if in sleep, to add weight to the illusion. Once he had turned completely, and positioned his hand beside his face to shield his spying, he cautiously opened his eyes.
The cell seemed darker than it had the night he had seen Billy with his face up to the window. As to the boy, he was not visible. Cleve opened his eyes a little wider and scanned the cell as best he could from between his fingers. There was something amiss, but he couldn't quite work out what it was. He lay there for several minutes, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the murk. They didn't. The scene in front of him remained unclear, like a painting so encrusted with dirt and varnish its depths refuse the investigating eye. Yet he knew - knew - that the shadows in the corners of the cell, and on the opposite wall, were not empty. He wanted to end the anticipation that was making his heart thump, wanted to raise his head from the pebble-filled pillow and call Billy out of hiding. But good sense counselled otherwise. Instead he lay still, and sweated, and watched.
And now he began to realize what was wrong with the scene before him. The concealing shadows fell where no shadows belonged; they spread across the hall where the feeble light from the window should have been falling. Somehow, between window and wall, that light had been choked and devoured. Cleve closed his eyes to give his befuddled mind a chance to rationalize and reject this conclusion. When he opened them again his heart lurched. The shadow, far from losing potency, had grown a little.
He had never been afraid like this before; never felt a coldness in his innards akin to the chill that found him now. It was all he could do to keep his breath even, and his hands where they lay. His instinct was to wrap himself up and hide his face like a child. Two thoughts kept him from doing so. One was that the slightest movement might draw unwelcome attention to him. The other, that Billy was somewhere in the cell, and perhaps as threatened by this living darkness as he.
And then, from the bunk below, the boy spoke. His voice was soft, so as not to wake his sleeping cell-mate presumably. It was also eerily intimate. Cleve entertained no thought that Billy was talking in his sleep; the time for wilful self-deception was long past. The boy was addressing the darkness; of that unpalatable fact there could be no doubt.
'... it hurts ...' he said, with a faint note of accusation,'... you didn't tell me how much it hurts ...'
Was it Cleve's imagination, or did the wraith of shadows bloom a little in response, like a squid's ink in water? He was horribly afraid. The boy was speaking again. His voice was so low Cleve could barely catch the words.
'... it must be soon ...' he said, with quiet urgency, '... I'm not afraid. Not afraid.'
Again, the shadow shifted. This time, when Cleve looked into its heart, he made some sense of the chimerical form it embraced. His throat shook; a cry lodged behind his tongue, hot to be shouted.
'... all you can teach me ...' Billy was saying,'... quickly ...' The words came and went; but Cleve barely heard them. His attention was on the curtain of shadow, and the figure - stitched from darkness - that moved in its folds. It was not an illusion. There was a man there: or rather a crude copy of one, its substance tenuous, its outline deteriorating all the time, and being hauled back into some semblance of humanity again only with the greatest effort. Of the visitor's features Cleve could see little, but enough to sense deformities paraded like virtues: a face resembling a plate of rotted fruit, pulpy and peeling, swelling here with a nest of flies, and there suddenly fallen away to a pestilent core. How could the boy bring himself to converse so easily with such a thing? And yet, putresence notwithstanding, there was a bitter dignity in the bearing of the creature, in the anguish of its eyes, and the toothless O of its maw.
Suddenly, Billy stood up. The abrupt movement, after so many hushed words, almost unleashed the cry from Cleve's throat. He swallowed it, with difficulty, and closed his eyes down to a slit, staring through the bars of his lashes at what happened next.
Billy was talking again, but now the voice was too low to allow for eavesdropping. He stepped towards the shadow, his body blocking much of the figure on the opposite wall. The cell was no more than two or three strides wide, but, by some mellowing of physics, the boy seemed to take five, six, seven steps away from the bunk. Cleve's eyes widened: he knew he was not being watched. The shadow and its acolyte had business between them: it occupied their attention utterly.
Billy's figure was smaller than seemed possible within the confines of the cell, as if he had stepped through the wall and into some other province. And only now, with his eyes wide, did Cleve recognize that place. The darkness from which Billy's visitor was made was cloud-shadow and dust; behind him, barely visible in the bewitched murk, but recognizable to any who had been there, was the city of Cleve's dreams.
Billy had reached his master. The creature towered above him, tattered and spindly, but aching with power. Cleve didn't know how or why the boy had gone to it, and he feared for Billy's safety now that he had, but fear for his own safety shackled him to the bunk. He realized in that moment that he had never loved anyone, man or woman, sufficiently to pursue them into the shadow of that shadow. The thought brought a terrible sense of isolation, knowing that same instant that none, seeing him walk to his damnation, would take a single step to claim him from the brink. Lost souls both; he and the boy.
Now Billy's lord was lifting his swollen head, and the incessant wind in those blue streets was rousing his horse-mane into furious life. On the wind, the same voices Cleve had heard carried before, the cries of mad children, somewhere between tears and howls. As if encouraged by these voices, the entity reached out towards Billy and embraced him, wrapping the boy round in vapour. Billy did not struggle in this embrace, but rather returned it. Cleve, unable to watch this horrid intimacy, closed his eyes against it, and when -seconds? minutes?, later - he opened them again, the encounter seemed to be over. The shadow-thing was blowing apart, relinquishing its slender claim to coherence. It fragmented, pieces of its tattered anatomy flying off into the streets like litter before wind. Its departure seemed to signal the dispersal of the e
ntire scene; the streets and houses were already being devoured by dust and distance. Even before the last of the shadow's scraps had been wafted out of sight the city was lost to sight. Cleve was pleased to be shut of it. Reality, grim as it was, was preferable to that desolation. Brick by painted brick the wall was asserting itself again, and Billy, delivered from his master's arms, was back in the solid geometry of the cell, staring up at the light through the window.
Cleve did not sleep again that night. Indeed he wondered, lying on his unyielding mattress and staring up at the stalactites of paint depending from the ceiling, whether he could ever find safety in sleep again.
Sunlight was a showman. It threw its brightness down with such flamboyance, eager as any tinsel-merchant to dazzle and distract. But beneath the gleaming surface it illuminated was another state; one that sunlight - ever the crowd-pleaser - conspired to conceal. It was vile and desperate, that condition. Most, blinded by sight, never even glimpsed it. But Cleve knew the state of sunlessness now; had even walked it, in dreams; and though he mourned the loss of his innocence, he knew he could never retrace his steps back into light's hall of mirrors.
He tried his damnedest to keep this change in him from Billy; the last thing he wanted was for the boy to suspect his eavesdropping. But concealment was well-nigh impossible. Though the following day Cleve made every show of normality he could contrive, he could not quite cover his unease. It slipped out without his being able to control it, like sweat from his pores. And the boy knew, no doubt of it, he knew. Nor was he slow to give voice to his suspicions. When, following the afternoon's Workshop, they returned to their cell, Billy was quick to come to the point.
'What's wrong with you today?'
Cleve busied himself with re-making his bed, afraid even to glance at Billy. 'Nothing's wrong,' he said. 'I don't feel particularly well, that's all.'
