by Clive Barker
Do this for us all.
I’m kissing you.
Suzanna.
He read the letter over and over, moved beyond telling by the way she’d signed off: I’m kissing you.
But he was confounded by her instructions: the book seemed an unremarkable volume, its binding torn, its pages yellowed. The text was in German, which he had no command of whatsoever. Even the illustrations were dark, and full of shadows, and he’d had enough shadows to hurt him a lifetime. But if she wanted him to keep it safe, then he’d do so. She was wise, and he knew better than to take her instructions lightly.
3
After the visit from Apolline, nobody else came. He was not altogether surprised. There’d been an urgency in the woman’s manner, and yet more in the letter from Suzanna. Our enemies are still with us. she’d written. If she wrote that, then it was true.
They discharged him after a week, and he made his way back to Liverpool. Little had changed. The grass still refused to grow in the churned earth where Lilia Pellicia had died; the trains still ran North and South; the china dogs on the dining-room sill still looked for their master, their vigil rewarded only with dust.
There was dust too on the note that Geraldine had left on the kitchen table – a brief missive saying that until Cal learned to behave like a reasonable human being he could expect none of her company.
There were several other letters awaiting him – one from his section leader at the firm, asking him where the hell he was, and stating that if he wished to keep his job he’d better make some explanation of his absence post haste. The letter was dated the 11th. It was now the 25th. Cal presumed he was out of a job.
He couldn’t find it in him to be much concerned by unemployment; nor indeed by Geraldine’s absence. He wanted to be alone; wanted the time to think through all that had happened. More significantly, he found feelings about anything hard to come by. As the days passed, and he made a stab at reassembling his life, he rapidly came to see that his time in the Gyre had left him wounded in more ways than one. It was as though the forces unleashed at the Temple had found their way into him, and left a little wilderness where there’d once been a capacity for tears and regret.
Even the poet was silent. Though Cal could still remember Mad Mooney’s verses by heart they were just sounds to him now; they failed to move.
There was one comfort in this: that perhaps his new-found stoicism suited better the function of solitary librarian. He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end, were most of his tribe: it didn’t mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing.
BOOK THREE
OUT OF
THE EMPTY
QUARTER
Part Ten
The Search for
the Scourge
… if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
I
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
1
efore the explorers, the Rub al Khali had been a blank space on the map of the world. After them, it remained so.
Its very name, given to it by the Bedu, the desert nomads who’d lived for unnumbered centuries in the deserts of the Arab Peninsula, meant: The Empty Quarter. That they, familiar with wildernesses that would drive most men insane, should designate this place empty was the most profound testament to its nullity imaginable.
But amongst those Europeans for whom names were not proof enough, and who had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, gone looking for places to test their mettle, the Rub al Khali rapidly acquired legendary status. It was perhaps the single greatest challenge the earth could offer to adventurers, its barrenness unrivalled by any wasteland, equatorial or arctic.
Nothing lived there, nor could. It was simply a vast nowhere, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of desolation, its dunes rising in places to the height of small mountains, and elsewhere giving way to tracts of heat-shattered stone large enough to lose a people in. It was trackless, waterless and changeless. Most who dared its wastes were swallowed by it, its dust increased by the sum of their powdered bones.
But for that breed of man – as much ascetic as explorer – who was half in love with losing himself to such an end – the number of expeditions that had retreated in the face of the Quarter’s maddening absence, or disappeared into it, was simply a spur.
Some challenged the wasteland in the name of cartology, determined to map the place for those who might come after them, only to discover that there was nothing to map but the chastening of their spirit. Others went looking for lost tombs and cities, where fabled wealth awaited that man strong enough to reach into Hell and snatch it out. Still others, a patient, secretive few, went in the name of Academe, seeking verification of theories geological or historical. Still others looked for the Ark there; or Eden.
All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter – even though their journey might have taken them only a day’s ride into that place – they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.
2
For years Shadwell had listened to Immacolata speak of the emptiness where the Scourge resided. Mostly she’d talked of it in abstract terms: a place of sand and terror. Though he’d comforted her in her fear as best he’d known how, he’d soon stopped listening to her babble.
But standing on the hill overlooking the valley which the Fugue had once occupied, blood on his hands and hatred in his heart, her words had come back to him. In subsequent months he’d set himself the task of discovering that place for himself.
He had chanced on pictures of the Rub al Khali early in his investigations, and had quickly come to believe that this was the wasteland she’d seen in her prophetic dreams. Even now, in the latter portion of the century, it remained largely a mystery. Commercial aircraft routes still gave it wide berth, and though a road now crossed it the desert swallowed the efforts of any who attempted to exploit its spaces. Shadwell’s problem was therefore this: if indeed the Scourge did live somewhere in the Empty Quarter, how would he be able to find it in a void so vast?
He began by consulting the experts: in particular an explorer called Emerson, who had twice crossed the Quarter by camel. He was now a withered and bed-bound old man, who was at first contemptuous of Shadwell’s ignorance. But after a few minutes’ talk he warmed to the obsessive in his visitor, and offered much good advice. When he spoke of the desert it was as of a lover who’d left stripes upon his back, yet whose cruelty he ached to have again.
As they parted he said:
‘I envy you, Shadwell. God alive, I envy you.’
3
Though Emerson had told him that the desert was always a solitary experience, Shadwell did not go alone to the Rub al Khali; he took Hobart with him.
The Law no longer called Hobart as it had. An investigation into the events that had all but destroyed his Division had found him criminally negligent; he might well have been imprisoned but that his masters concluded he was unbalanced – indeed probably always had been – and that exposi
ng a system that would employ such a madman to the scrutiny of a court case would cover none of them in glory. Instead a complete story was fabricated – which made heroes of those men who’d gone into the Fugue with Hobart and died there, and retired on full pay those who’d emerged with their sanity in tatters. There was a valiant attempt by several bereaved wives to discredit this fiction, but when hints of the real explanation were uncovered it seemed infinitely more unlikely than the lie. Nor were the survivors able to give any coherent account of what they’d experienced. Those few details they did unburden themselves of merely served to confirm their lunacy.
Hobart, however, did not have madness as a place of retreat, having been in its hold for years. The vision of fire that Shadwell had given him – and which had first claimed him for the Salesman’s faction – obsessed him still, despite the fact that the coat had been discarded. Knowing that in Shadwell’s company his obsession would not be mocked, Hobart elected to remain there. With Shadwell, his dreams had come closest to being realized; and, though their shared ambitions had been defeated, the man still spoke a language Hobart’s dementia understood. When the Salesman talked of the Scourge, Hobart knew it could only be the Dragon of his dreams by another name. Once, he half-remembered, he’d sought that monster in a forest, but he’d found only confusion there. It had been a sham, that Dragon; not the true beast he still longed to meet. He knew where that legend waited now: not in a forest but a desert, where its breath had reduced all living matter to ash and sand.
They went together, therefore, to a village on the Southern fringe of the Quarter; a place so inconsequential it couldn’t even lay claim to a name.
Here they were obliged to leave their jeep, and, with their driver as interpreter, pick up guides and camels. It was not simply the practical problems of crossing the Quarter by vehicle that made Shadwell forsake wheel for hooves. It was a desire – encouraged by Emerson – to be as much a part of the desert as was possible. To go into that void not as conquerors but as penitents.
Locating their two guides for the expedition was the business of an hour, no more, there being so few either willing or able-bodied enough to make the journey. Both men were of Ahl Murra tribe, who alone of all the tribes claimed spiritual kinship with the Quarter. The first, a fellow called Mitrak ibn Talaq, Shadwell chose because he boasted that he’d guided white men into the Rub al Khali (and back out again) on four previous occasions. But he would not go without the company of a younger man by the name of Jabir, whom he variously described as his cousin, half-cousin and brother-in-law. This other looked to be little more than fifteen, but had the scrawny strength and the worldly-wise glance of a man three times that age.
Hobart was left to haggle with them, though the terms of the arrangements took some time to sort out, as the Arabic he’d learned for this expedition was primitive, and the Arabs’ English was bad. They seemed to know their profession however. The purchase of camels was the business of half a day; the purchasing of supplies another morning.
It was therefore the labour of a mere forty-eight hours to prepare for the crossing.
On the day of their departure, however, Shadwell – whose fastidiousness had not kept him from satisfying his belly – fell foul of an intestinal plague that turned his innards to water. With his gut in revolt he couldn’t keep a morsel of food in his system long enough to profit by it, and he quickly became weak. Wracked by fever, and with access only to the most rudimentary medication, all he could do was take refuge in the hovel they’d hired, find the corner where the sun couldn’t reach him, and there sweat the sickness out.
Two days passed, without his improving. He was not used to illness, but on those few occasions he had fallen sick he’d always hidden himself away, and suffered in private. Here, privacy was nearly impossible to find. All day he could hear scrabblings outside the door and window, as people fought for a chance to peer through the cracks at the infidel, moaning on his filthy sheet. And when the locals grew tired of the spectacle there were still the flies, watching over him, thirsty for the tainted waters at his lips and eyes. He’d long since learned the hopelessness of shooing them away. He simply lay in his sweat and let them drink, his fevered mind drifting off to cooler places.
On the third day Hobart suggested they postpone the journey, pay off Ibn Talaq and Jabir, and return to civilization. There Shadwell could regain his strength for another try. Shadwell protested at this, but the same thought had crept into his own head more than once. When the infection finally left his body, he’d be in no fit state to dare the Quarter.
That night, however, things changed. For one, there was a wind. It came not in gusts but as a steady assault, the sand it carried creeping in beneath the door and through the cracks in the window.
Shadwell had slept a little during the preceding day, and had benefited from his rest, but the wind prevented him from settling now. The disturbance got into his gut too, obliging him to spend half the night squatting over the bucket he’d been provided with, while his bowels gave vent.
That was where he was – squatting in misery in a cloud of flatulence – when he first heard the voice. It came out of the desert, rising and falling like the wail of some infernal widow. He’d never heard its like.
He stood up, soiling his legs in doing so, his body wracked with shudders.
It was the Scourge he was hearing, he had no doubt. The sound was muted, but indisputable. A voice of grief, and power; and summoning. It offered them a signpost. They would not have to go blindly into the wilderness, hoping luck would bring them to their destination. They’d follow the route the wind had come. Sooner or later wouldn’t it lead them to the creature whose voice it carried?
He hoisted up his trousers and opened the door. The wind was running wild through the tiny town, depositing sand wherever it went, whining at the houses like a rabid dog. He listened again for the voice of the Scourge, praying that it was not some hallucination brought on by his hunger. It was not. It came again, the same anguished howl.
One of the villagers hurried past the spot where Shadwell stood. The Salesman stepped out of the doorway and took the man’s arm.
‘You hear?’ he said.
The man turned his scarred face towards Shadwell. One of his eyes was missing.
‘Hear?’ said Shadwell, pointing to his head as the sound came again.
The man shook off Shadwell’s grip.
‘Al hiyal,’ the man replied, practically spitting the words out.
Huh?’
‘Al hiyal …’ he said again, backing away from Shadwell as from a dangerous idiot, his hand at the knife in his belt.
Shadwell had no argument with the man; he raised his hands, smiling, and left him to his troubles.
A curious exhilaration had seized hold of him, making his starved brain sing. They’d go tomorrow into the Quarter, and damn his intestines to Hell. As long as he could stay upright on a saddle he could make the journey.
He stood in the middle of the squalid street, his heart pounding like a jack-hammer, his legs trembling.
‘I hear you,’ he said; and the wind took the words from his lips as if by some perverse genius known only to desert winds it could return the way it had come, and deliver Shadwell’s words back to the power that awaited him in the void.
II
OBLIVION
1
othing, neither in the books he’d read nor the testimonies he’d listened to, nor even in the tormented voice he’d heard on the wind the previous night, had prepared Shadwell for the utter desolation of the Rub al Khali. The books had described its wastes as best words could, but they couldn’t evoke the terrible nullity of the place. Even Emerson, whose mixture of understatement and passion had been persuasive in the extreme, hadn’t come near to touching upon the blank truth.
The journey was hour upon relentless hour upon relentless hour of heat and bare horizons, the same imbecile sky overhead, the same dead ground beneath the camels’ feet.
Shadwel
l had no energy to waste on conversation; and Hobart had always been a silent man. As for Ibn Talaq and the boy, they rode ahead of the infidels, occasionally whispering, but mostly keeping their counsel. With nothing to divert the attention, the mind turned to the body for its subject, and rapidly became obsessed with sensation. The rhythm of the thighs as they chafed against the saddle, or the taste of the blood from the lips and gums; these were thought’s only fodder.
Even speculation about what might lie at this journey’s end was lost in the dull blur of discomfort.
Seventy-two hours passed without incident: only the same curdling heat, the same rhythm of hoof on sand, hoof on sand, as they followed the bearing of the wind on which the Scourge’s voice had come. Neither of the Arabs made any enquiry as to the infidels’ purpose, nor was any explanation offered. They simply marched, the void pressing upon them from all sides.
It was worse by far when they stopped, either to rest the camels, or to offer their sand-dogged throats a dribble of water. Then the sheer immensity of the silence came home to them.
Existence here was an irrational act, in defiance of all physical imperatives. What kind of creature had chosen to make its home in such an absence, Shadwell wondered at such moments: and what force of will must it possess, to withstand the void? Unless – and this thought came more and more – it was of the void: a part of the emptiness and silence. That possibility made his belly chum: that the power he sought belonged here – chose dunes for its bed and rock for its pillow. He finally began to understand why Immacolata’s visions of the Scourge had brought sweat to her brow. In those nightmares she had tasted a terrible purity, one that had made her own pale by its light.
But he was not afraid; except of failing. Until he stepped into the presence of that creature – until he learned the source of its cleanliness, he could not be cleansed himself. That he longed for above all things.
