by Clive Barker
But rumour and supposition apart, there was little to report. She got on with trying to make sense of her old life, while they made new lives for themselves. As to Cal, she followed his rehabilitation through Kind who’d gone to ground in Liverpool, but made no direct contact This was in part a practical decision: it was wiser that they kept their distance from each other until they were certain the enemy had disappeared. But it was also an emotional consideration. They had shared much, in the Fugue and out. Too much to be lovers. The Weaveworld occupied the space between them – it had from the beginning. That fact made a nonsense of any thought of a domestic or romantic arrangement. They’d seen Hell and Heaven together. After that, surely everything else was bathos.
Presumably Cal felt the same, because he made no attempt at contacting her. Not that it was necessary. Though they neither saw nor spoke to each other she felt his constant presence. She had been the one to nip in the bud any possibility of physical love between them, and she had sometimes regretted that; but what they shared now was perhaps the highest aspiration of all lovers: between them they held a world.
3
In the middle of October her work started to take a new and completely uncharacteristic turn. For no particular reason she forsook her plates and bowls and began to work figuratively. The results gained her few admirers, but they satisfied some inner imperative which would not be gainsaid.
Meanwhile, Finnegan pressed his suit with dinners and flowers, his attentions redoubling each time she politely rejected him. She began to think there was more than a streak of the masochist in his nature, coming back as he did each time she sent him on his way.
Of all the extraordinary times she’d had since she’d first become part of the Fugue’s story, these were in their way the strangest, as her experience of the Weaveworld and that of her present life did battle in her head for the right to be called real. She knew this was Cuckoo thinking; that they were both real. But her mind would not marry them – nor her place in them. What did the woman Finnegan proclaimed his love for – the smiling, day beneath the fingers Suzanna – have to do with the woman who’d stood face to face with dragons? She came to wish she couldn’t evoke those mythic times as well as she could, because afterwards she’d feel sick with the triviality of being herself.
For that reason she kept a rein on the menstruum, which was not difficult to do. Its once unpredictable nature was much tamed now; a consequence of the Fugue’s demise, she assumed. It hadn’t foresaken her entirely. Sometimes it seemed to get restless, and decided to stretch itself, usually – though it took her a little time to realize this – in response to some environmental cue. There were places in the Kingdom that were charged up; places where she sensed a spring beneath the earth, aching to fountain. The menstruum knew them. So, in some cases, did the Cuckoos, sanctifying the spots as best their myopia knew how: with steeples and monuments. Just as many of these territories remained unrecognized, however, and passing through some unremarkable street she’d feel a surge in her belly, and know power was buried there.
Most of her life she’d associated power with politics or money, but her secret self had learned better. Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could. She saw its processes even in Finnegan. On the few occasions she coaxed him to talk about his past, particularly his childhood, she saw the colours around his head strengthen and ripen, as in the act of imagining he was reunited with himself; made a continuum. At those moments she’d remember the line from Mimi’s book:
That which is imagined need never be lost.
And on those days she was even happy.
4
Then, early in the third week of December, any fragile hope of good times abruptly came to an end.
The weather turned icy that week. Not just bitter, but arctic. There was no snow as yet, just a cold so profound the nerve-endings couldn’t tell it from fire. She still worked on in the studio, unwilling to give up her creating, though her paraffin heater could barely raise the temperature above zero, and she was obliged to wear two sweaters and three pairs of socks. She scarcely noticed. She’d never been so preoccupied with making as she was now, bullying the day into the shapes in her mind’s eye.
Then, on the seventeenth, completely without warning, Apolline came calling. The eternal widow, she was swathed in black from head to foot.
‘We have to speak,’ she said, as soon as the door was closed.
Suzanna escorted her through to the studio, and cleared a seat for her amid the chaos. She didn’t want to sit, however, but wandered around the room, eventually ending up at the frost-scoured windows, peering out of them while Suzanna rinsed the day from her hands.
‘Are you bang followed?’ Suzanna asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ came the reply. ‘Maybe.’
‘Do you want some coffee?’
‘I’d prefer something stronger. What have you got?’
‘Just brandy.’
‘Just brandy will do.’
She sat. Suzanna located the bottle she kept for her occasional one-woman parties, and put an ample measure in a cup. Apolline drained it, filled it a second time, then said:
‘Have you had the dreams?’
‘What dreams?’
‘We’ve all been having them,’ Apolline said.
The way she looked – face sallow despite the cold, eyes ringed with darkness – Suzanna wondered that she’d had any sleep at all of late.
‘Terrible dreams,’ the widow went on, ‘like the end of the world.’
‘Who’s been having them?’
‘Who hasn’t?’ said Apolline. ‘Everyone, the same thing. The same appalling thing.’
She’d drained her cup a second time, and now took the bottle from the bench for a further shot.
‘Something bad’s going to happen. We can all feel it. That’s why I’ve come.’
Suzanna watched her while she poured herself more brandy, her mind posing two quite separate questions. First: were these nightmares simply the inevitable result of the horrors the Seerkind had endured, or something more? And – if the latter – why hadn’t she had them too?
Apolline interrupted these thoughts, her words slightly slurred by her intake of alcohol.
‘People are saying it’s the Scourge. That it’s coming for us again, after all this time. Apparently this is the way it first made its presence known before. In dreams.’
‘And you think they’re right?’
Apolline winced as she swallowed another throatful of brandy.
‘Whatever it is, we have to protect ourselves.’
‘Are you suggesting some kind of … offensive?’
Apolline shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Most of them are so damn passive. It sickens me, how they lie back and take whatever comes their way. Worse than whores.’
She stopped, and sighed heavily. Then said:
‘Some of the younger ones have got it into their heads that maybe we can raise the Old Science.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘To finish off the Scourge, of course!’ she snapped, ‘before it finishes us.’
‘How do you estimate our chances?’
‘A little better than zero,’ Apolline grunted. ‘Jesus, I don’t know! At least we’re wise to it this time. That’s something. Some of us are going back to the places where there was some power, to see if we can dredge up anything useful.’
‘After all these years?
‘Who’s counting?’ she said. ‘Raptures don’t age.’
‘So what are we looking for?’
‘Signs. Prophecies. God knows.’
She put down her cup, and traipsed back to the window, rubbing at the frost with the ball of her gloved hand to clear a spy-hole. She peered out, then made a ruminative grunt before once more turning her narrowed eyes on Suzanna.
‘You know what I think?’ she announced.
‘What?’
‘I think you’re keeping so
mething from us.’
Suzanna said nothing, which won a second grunt from Apolline.
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘You think we’re our own worst enemies, eh? Not to be trusted with secrets?’ Her gaze was black and bright. ‘You may be right,’ she said. ‘We fell for Shadwell’s performance, didn’t we? At least some of us did.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘I had distractions,’ she answered. ‘Business in the Kingdom. Come to that, I still do …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I thought I could turn my back on the rest of them, you see. Ignore them and be happy. But I can’t. In the end … I think I must belong with them, God help me.’
‘We came so close to losing everything,’ said Suzanna.
‘We did lose,’ said Apolline.
‘Not quite.’
The interrogating eyes grew sharper; and Suzanna teetered on the edge of pouring out all that had happened to Cal and herself in the Gyre. But Apolline’s appraisal was accurate: she didn’t trust them with their own miracles. Her instinct told her to keep her account of the Loom to herself for a while longer. So instead of spilling the story she said:
‘At least we’re still alive.’
Apolline, undoubtedly sensing that she’d come close to a revelation and been denied it, spat on the floor.
‘Small comfort,’ she said. ‘We’re reduced to digging around in the Kingdom for some sniff of rapture. It’s pitiful.’
‘So what can I do to help?’
Apolline’s expression was almost venomous; nothing would have given her greater satisfaction, Suzanna guessed, than walking out on this devious Cuckoo.
‘We’re not enemies,’ said Suzanna.
‘Are we not?’
‘You know we’re not. I want to do whatever I can for you.’
‘So you say,’ Apolline replied, without much conviction. She looked away towards the window, her tongue ferreting in her cheek for a polite word. ‘Do you know this wretched city well?’ she said finally.
‘Pretty well.’
‘So you could go looking, could you? Around and about.’
‘I could. I will.’
Apolline dug a scrap of paper from her pocket, torn from a notebook.
‘Here are some addresses,’ she said.
‘And where will you be?’
‘Salisbury. There was a massacre there, back before the Weave. One of the cruellest, in fact; a hundred children died. I might sniff something out.’
Her attention had suddenly been claimed by the shelves on which Suzanna had put some of her recent work. She went to it, her skirts trailing in the clay dust.
‘I thought you said you hadn’t been dreaming?’ she remarked.
Suzanna scanned the row of pieces. She’d been immersed in their making for so long she’d scarcely been conscious of their potency, or indeed the consistency of the obsession behind them. Now she saw them with fresh eyes. They were all human figures, but twisted out of true, as though (the thought came with a pricking of the scalp) they were at the heart of some devouring fire; caught in the instant before it erased their faces. Like all of her current work they were unglazed, and roughly rendered. Was that because their tragedy was as yet unwritten: simply an idea in the fermenting mind of the future?
A pollute took one of the figures down, and ran her thumb over its contorted features.
‘You’ve been dreaming with your eyes open,’ she commented, and Suzanna knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was true.
‘It’s a good likeness,’ the widow said.
‘Of whom?’
Apolline set the tragic mask back on the shelf.
‘Of us all.’
III
NO LULLABIES
1
al had been sleeping alone when he had the first of the nightmares.
It began on Venus Mountain; he was wandering there, his legs ready to give out beneath him. But with that horrid foreknowledge of disaster that dreams grant he knew it would not be wise to close his eyes and sleep. Instead he stood on the warm ground while forms that were lit as if by a sun that had already set behind the mountain moved around him. A man was dancing nearby, his skirts like living tissue; a girl flew over, trailing the scent of her sex; there were lovers in the long grass, coupling. One of them cried out, whether in pleasure or alarm he wasn’t certain, and the next moment he was running over the mountainside, and there was something coming after him, something vast and remorseless.
He shouted as he ran, to alert the lovers and the bird-girl and the dancer to the horror that had come for them all, but his voice was pitifully thin – the voice of a mouse – and the next moment the grass around him began to smoulder. Before his eyes the coupling bodies now burst into flames; an instant later the girl fell out of the sky, her body consumed by the same venomous fire. Again, he shouted, in terror this time, trying to leap over the flames as they advanced across the ground in his direction. But he wasn’t agile enough. His heels caught fire, and he felt the heat creep up the back of his legs as he ran.
Howling now, he found an extra burst of speed, and suddenly Venus Mountain was gone, and he was running barefoot down streets he’d known since childhood. It was night, but the lamps along the street had been smashed, and the paving stones torn up beneath his feet made the going treacherous.
Still the pursuer came after him, sniffing his carbonized heels.
Knowing it would outpace him given time, he looked for some place of sanctuary as he ran, but the doors of the houses – even those of childhood friends – were nailed shut, the windows boarded up.
There was no help to be had here. All he could do was keep running, in the vain hope that the monster would be distracted by more tempting quarry.
An alleyway caught his eye; he ducked down it. Made a turn, made another turn. Ahead, a brick wall, and in it, a door, through which he hurled himself. Only then did he realize where this inevitable route had taken him.
He knew the yard at once, though the wall had grown twice as high since he’d last been here, and the gate through which he’d stepped a moment ago had sealed itself up. It was the yard behind Mimi Laschenski’s house. Once, in another life, he’d stood on that wall, and toppled, and fallen, finally, into paradise.
But there was no carpet in the yard now, nor any presence, bird or man, to offer their consolation. Just him, and the four shadowy corners of the yard, and the sound of his pursuer approaching the hiding place.
He took refuge in one of the corners and crouched down. Though the heels beneath his buttocks had been extinguished, his panic had not; he felt sick with fear.
The monster approached. He smelt the heat off its hide. It wasn’t the heat of life – not sweat or breath – but a dry, dead fire; ancient, merciless; an oven in which all the good of the world might be cremated. And it was close. Just beyond the wall.
He held his breath. There was a crippling ache in his bladder. He put his hands between his legs, cupping his prick and balls, shaking with terror. Make it go away, he silently pleaded to the darkness: make it leave me alone and I’ll be good as gold forever: I swear I will.
Though he could scarcely believe his luck, his appeal was heard, for the presence on the other side of the wall gave up its pursuit and retreated. His spirits lifted a little, but he kept his cramped position until his dream-sense told him that the enemy had withdrawn entirely. Only then did he dare stand up again, his joints cracking.
The pressure in his bladder would no longer be denied. Turning to the wall, he unzipped himself. The brick was hot from the presence of the creature, and his piss hissed against it.
In mid-flow, the sun came out, suddenly, flooding the yard. No, it wasn’t the sun. It was his pursuer, rising over the wall, its head hotter than a hundred noons, its oven-maw open wide.
He could not help but look into its face, though it would surely blind him. He saw enough eyes for a nation, pressed side by side, set on great wheels, their nerves drawn out like bright threads and knotted in the bel
ly of the creature. There was more, much more, but he only glimpsed it before the heat set him alight from head to toe-nail.
He shrieked.
And with the cry, the yard disappeared, and he was travelling again on Venus Mountain, only this time the landscape beneath him was not earth and rock, but flesh and bone. It was his own body he was flying over, his substance become a world, and it was burning up, burning to extinction. His shriek was the land’s shriek, and it rose and rose as he and it were utterly consumed.
Too much!
He woke suddenly to find himself curled up in the middle of the bed, a knot of dreamt agony. He was sweating so much surely the fire would have been extinguished.
But no. It burned on in his mind’s eye for minutes afterwards, still bright.
2
It was more than a nightmare, he knew; it had the potency of a vision. After that first visit there was a blank night, then it came again, and again the night after. The particulars were altered somewhat (a different street, a different prayer) but it was in essence the same warning; or prophecy.
There was a gap of several days before the fourth dream, and this time Geraldine was with him. Though she made every attempt to wake him – he was howling, she said – he could not be roused until the dream was over. Only then did he open his eyes to find her sobbing with panic.
‘I thought you were dying,’ she said, and he half believed she was right; that his heart would not bear many more of these terrors before it burst.
It was not just his death the vision promised, however; it was that of the people on Venus Mountain, who seemed to occupy his very substance. A catastrophe was coming, that would lay waste those few Seerkind who had survived; who were, in their way, as intimate to him as his own flesh. That was what the dream told.
He lived through November in fear of sleep, and what it would bring. The nights were growing longer, the portions of light shrinking. It was as if the year itself was sliding into sleep, and in the mind of the night that would follow the substance of his dream was taking shape. A week into December, with the nightmare coming almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he knew he had to speak to Suzanna. Find her, and tell her what he was seeing.
