by Clive Barker
The second bird was rising now, while the first flapped like a toy on a stick. He hadn’t time to free the blade. He just let his left hand do as the right had done, and up it went like five-fingered lightning to strike the bird from the air. Down the creature tumbled, landing belly up at Will’s feet. His blow had broken its neck it feebly flapped its wings a moment, shitting itself. Then it died.
Will looked at its mate. In the time it had taken to kill the second bird, the first had also perished. Its blood, running down the blade, was hot on his hand.
Easy, he thought, just as he’d said it would be. A moment ago they’d been blinking their eyes and cocking their heads, hearts beating. Now they were dead, both of them, spilled and broken. Easy.
“What you’ve just done is irreversible,” said Jacob, laying his hands upon Will’s shoulders from behind. “Think of that.” His touch was no longer light. “This is not a world of resurrections. They’ve gone. Forever.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Jacob said. There was as much weight in his words as in his palms. “Not yet, you don’t. You see them dead before you, but knowing what that means takes a little time.” He lifted his left hand from Will’s shoulder and reached around his body. “May I have my knife back? If you’re sure you’ve finished with it, that is.”
Will slid the bird off the blade, bloodying the fingers of his other hand in the doing, and tossed the corpse down beside its mate. Then he wiped the knife clean on the arm of his jacket—an impressively casual gesture, he thought—and passed it back into Jacob’s care, as cautiously as he’d been lent it.
“Suppose I were to tell you,” Jacob said softly, almost mournfully, “that these two things at your feet—which you so efficiently dispatched—were the last of their kind?”
“The last birds?”
“No,” Jacob said, indulgently. “Nothing so ambitious. Just the last of these birds.”
“Are they?”
“Suppose they were,” Jacob replied. “How would you feel?”
“I don’t know,” Will said, quite honestly. “I mean, they’re just birds.”
“Oh now,” Jacob chided, “think again.” Will obeyed. And as had happened several times in Steep’s presence, his mind grew strange to itself, filling with thoughts it had never dared before. He looked down at his guilty hands, and the blood seemed to throb on them, as though the memory of the bird’s pulse was still in it. And while he looked he turned over what Jacob had just said.
Suppose they were the last, the very last, and the deed he’d just done was irreversible. No resurrections here. Not tonight, not ever. Suppose they were the last, blue and brown. The last that would ever hop that way, sing that way, court and mate and make more birds who hopped and sung and courted that way.
“Oh,” he murmured, beginning to understand. “I . . . changed the world a little bit, didn’t I?” He turned and looked up at Jacob. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what I did! I changed the world.”
“Maybe . . .” Jacob said. There was a tiny smile of satisfaction on his face, that his pupil was so swift. “If these were the last, perhaps it was more than a little.”
“Are they?” Will said. “The last, I mean?”
“Would you like them to be?” Will wanted it too much for words. All he could do was nod. “Another night, perhaps,” Jacob said. “But not tonight. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but these,” he looked down at the bodies in the grass, “are as common as moths.” Will felt as though he’d just been given a present and found it was just an empty box. “I know how it is, Will. What you’re feeling now. Your hands tell you you’ve done something wonderful, but you look around and nothing much seems to have changed. Am I right?”
“Yes,” he said. He suddenly wanted to wipe the worthless blood off his hands. They’d been so quick and so clever; they deserved better. The blood of something rare, something whose passing would be of consequence. He bent down and, plucking up a fistful of sharp grass, began to scrub his palms clean.
“So what do we do now?” he said as he worked. “I don’t want to stay here any longer. I want to . . .” He didn’t finish his chatter, however, for at that moment a ripple passed through the air surrounding them, as though the earth itself had expelled a tiny breath. He ceased his scrubbing and slowly rose to his feet, letting the grass drop.
“What was that?” he whispered.
“You did it, not I,” Jacob replied. There was a tone in his voice Will had not heard before, and it wasn’t comforting.
“What did I do?” Will said, looking all around for some explanation. But there was nothing that hadn’t been there all along. Just the trees, and the snow and the stars.
“I don’t want this,” Jacob was murmuring. “Do you hear me? I don’t want this.” All the weight had vanished from his voice, so had the certainty.
Will looked around at him. Saw his stricken face. “Don’t want what?” Will asked him.
Jacob turned his fretful gaze in Will’s direction. “You’ve more power in you than you realize, boy,” he said. “A lot more.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Will protested.
“You’re a conduit.”
“I’m a what?”
“Damn it, why didn’t I see? Why didn’t I see?” He backed away from Will, as the air shook again, more violently than before. “Oh Christ in Heaven. I don’t want this.” His anguish made Will panic. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear from his idol. He’d done all he’d been asked to do. He’d killed the birds, cleaned and returned the knife, even put a brave face on his disappointment. So why was his deliverer retreating from him as though Will were a rabid dog?
“Please,” he said to Steep, “I didn’t mean it, whatever it was I did, I’m sorry . . .”
But Jacob just continued to retreat. “It’s not you. It’s us. I don’t want your eyes going where I’ve been. Not there, at least.
Not to him. Not to Thomas—”
He was starting to babble again, and Will, certain his savior was about to run, and equally certain that once he was gone it would be over between them, reached and grabbed hold of the man’s sleeve. Jacob cried out and tried to shake himself free, but in doing so Will’s hand, seeking better purchase, caught hold of his fingers. Their touching had made Will strong before; he’d climbed the hill light-footed because Jacob’s flesh had been laid on his. But the business of the knife had wrought some change in him. He was no longer a passive recipient of strength. His bloodied fingers had been granted talents of their own, and he could not control them. He heard Jacob cry out a second time. Or was it his own voice? No, it was both. Two sobs, rising as though from a single throat.
Jacob had been right to be afraid. The same rippling breath that had distracted Will from cleaning his hands was here again, increased a hundredfold, and this time it inhaled the very world in which they stood. Earth and sky shuddered and were in an instant reconfigured, leaving them each in their terror: Will sobbing that he did not know what was happening; Jacob, that he did.
X
i
Later, with the good butcher Donnelly dead, Geoffrey Sauls, who had accompanied him into the Courthouse that night, would offer a bowdlerized version of what happened within. This he did to protect both the memory of the deceased man, who’d been his drinking and darts partner for seventeen years, and Donnelly’s widow, whose grief would have been cruelly exacerbated by the truth. Which was: They had climbed the steps of the Courthouse thinking that perhaps they’d be the heroes of the night. There was somebody inside, no doubt of that, and more than likely it was the runaway. Who else was it going to be, they reasoned. Donnelly had been a pace or two ahead of Sauls and had therefore arrived in the courtroom first. Sauls had heard him mutter something awestruck and had come to Donnelly’s side to find not the missing boy but a woman, standing in the middle of the chamber. There were two or three fat candles set on the ground close to where she stood, and by their flattering light he saw that sh
e was partially undressed. Her breasts, which had a gloss of sweat upon them, were bared, and she’d hoisted up her skirt high enough that her hand could roam between her legs, a smile spreading across her face as she pleasured herself. Though her body was firm (her breasts rode as high as an eighteen year old’s), her features bore the stamp of experience. Not that she was lined or flabby; her skin was perfect. But there was about her lips and eyes a confidence that belied her flawless cheeks and brow. In short, Sauls knew the instant he set eyes upon her that this was a woman who knew her mind. He didn’t like that one bit.
Donnelly, on the other hand, did. He’d had a couple of double brandies before setting out, and they’d loosened his tongue.
“You’re a lovely,” he said appreciatively. “Aren’t you a bit cold?” The woman gave him the reply he’d surely been hoping for.
“You look like you’ve got plenty of meat on you,” she said, earning a chuckle from the butcher. “Why don’t you come over here and warm me up a bit?”
“Del,” Sauls warned, catching hold of his friend’s arm,
“We’re not here for shenanigans. We’re here to find the boy.”
“Poor Will,” the woman said. “A lost lamb if ever there was one.”
“Do you know where he is?” Geoffrey said.
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” the woman replied. Her eyes were fixed on Donnelly, her hands still playing away.
“Is he here somewhere?” Sauls asked her.
“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”
The reply made Sauls more uneasy than ever. Did it mean she had the boy a prisoner here? God help him if she did. There was a gleam of lunacy in her eyes and in this whorish display of hers. Though he loved Delbert dearly, no sane woman would be inviting him to touch her the way she was right now: her dress lifted so high her privates were on display, her fingers plunged into them to the second knuckle.
“I’d keep your distance if I were you, Delbert,” Sauls advised.
“She just wants a bit o’ fun,” Del replied, swaying toward the woman.
“The boy’s here somewhere,” Sauls said.
“So go find him,” Donnelly replied dreamily, raising his sausage fingers to fondle the woman’s breasts. “I’ll keep her distracted.”
“I’ll take you both on if you like,” the woman suggested.
But Delbert wasn’t feeling democratic. “Go on, Geoffrey,” he said, his tone faintly threatening. “I can handle her on my own, thank you very much.”
Geoffrey had only brawled with Delbert once in his life (over a contested darts match, naturally), and he’d come off much the worse. The butcher was more bulk than brawn, but Geoffrey was a bantamweight, and within half a minute he’d found himself flat on his back in the gutter. Given that he, couldn’t hope physically to pry Del from the object of his affection, he had little choice but to do as the man said, and go look for the child. He did so quickly, so as not to be gone from the courtroom itself for very long. With his torchbeam lighting the way ahead he searched the passages and chambers in a systematic fashion, calling for the boy as though for a lost dog.
“Will? Where are you? Come on. It’s okay. Will?” In one of the rooms he came upon what he assumed to be the whore’s belongings: two or three bags, and some scattered articles of clothing, along with a variety of paraphernalia that looked vaguely erotic in purpose. (He didn’t have time to study them closely. But many months later, when the trauma of this night had receded, his mind would guiltily revisit this litter, and obsess on it, imagining the purpose to which she had put these barbed rods and silken cords.) In a second chamber he found a still more disturbing sight. Overturned furniture, ashes underfoot, fragments of charred debris what he didn’t find was the boy; all the other rooms, and there were several, were deserted.
The layout of the place was tricky to grasp, especially in his present state of anxiety. He might well have got lost in the maze of chambers and passages had he not heard Delbert start to shout, or sob maybe—yes, it was a sob—and followed the din back through the corridors, through the room with the ashes, and that unholy boudoir, to the courtroom.
And now, of course, we come to that part he kept from telling in its entirety, preferring to risk a lie than defame his friend. Delbert was not, as Sauls would later testify, laying inert on the floor, sobbing to be saved. Supine he certainly was, his pants and underwear somewhere around his boots, his head and arms thrown back. But there was no appeal in his cry, except perhaps that the woman straddling him, her hands digging into the mottled fat of his belly, ride him harder, harder.
“Jesus, Del,” Sauls said, appalled at the sight.
Delbert’s little eyes, upside-down in the wet, hot bulk of his head, burned with pleasure.
“Go. Away.” he said.
“No, no . . .” the woman panted, beckoning Geoffrey to her and proffering her breast. “I can use him here.” Even in the throes of his delirium, however, Donnelly was feeling proprietorial: “Fuck off, Geoffrey,” he said, skewing his head around to get a better fix on the competition. “I saw her first.”
“I think it’s time you shut up!” the woman snapped, and for the first time Geoffrey saw that there was something wrapped around Del’s neck. From what he could see it looked to be no more than a thin piece of rope with a few beads threaded along its length, except that it moved, in serpentine fashion, its tail twitching between Del’s pink tits, its body sliding upon itself as it tightened its grip. Del suddenly made a choking sound, and his fingers went up to his throat, scrabbling at the cord. His red face suddenly got redder still.
“Now, come here,” the woman instructed Geoffrey, sweetly enough. He shook his head. If he’d had any urge to touch the creature, it had been scared out of him. “I’m not going to tell you again,” she said to Sauls. Then, glancing down at Delbert, she murmured, “Do you want it tighter?” A pitiful gurgling sound was all that escaped him, but the snake rope seemed to take that as a yes and duly tightened.
“Stop!” Sauls said, “You’re killing him!” She stared at him, her face as blank as it was beautiful, so he said it again, in case the bitch in her heat hadn’t understood what she was doing. But she understood. He saw that now, saw the look of pleasure cross her face as poor Delbert bucked and thrashed beneath her. He had to stop her, and quickly, or Del would be dead.
“What do you want?” he said, approaching her.
“Kiss me,” she said, her eyes become slits in a face that was somehow simpler than it had been moments ago, as though it were being unmade before his eyes by some invisible sculptor.
He would have preferred to clamp his mouth to his own mother-in-law’s maw than kiss the moist hole in the whore’s face, but Del’s life was ebbing away by the gasp. A few moments more, and it would be gone. Steeling his courage, he pressed his lips against the unbecoming flesh of her mouth, only to have her take hold of his hair—what little he had—and haul back his head.
“Not there!” she said, the words coming on a breath so balmy and sweetly scented he momentarily forgot his fear. “Here! Here!” She pressed his face down toward her bosom, but as he stooped to service her Delbert’s flailing arms caught hold of Geoffrey’s right boot and pulled. He stumbled backward, vaguely aware that this was more farce than tragedy, his outstretched hand raking the woman’s pristine skin as he tried to prevent himself falling. It was no use. Down he went, ass first, the breath knocked out of him.
As he raised his head he saw the woman climbing off Delbert, clutching her breast. “Look what you did,” she said to him, showing him the marks where his fingernails had caught her. He protested that it had been an accident. “Look!” she said again, advancing on him. “You marked me!” Behind her, Delbert was gurgling like a monstrous baby, his arms no longer strong enough to flail or his legs to kick. There was another of the woman’s pet ropes slithering around his groin, Geoffrey saw, most of its length constricting the base of his prick, so that it stood up—even now, even as the last of his life w
ent out of him—stout and stiff.
“He’s dying,” Sauls said to the woman.
She glanced back at the body on the ground. “So he is,” she remarked. Then, looking back at Geoffrey, “But he got what he wanted, didn’t he? So now, the question is: What do you want?” He wasn’t going to lie. He wasn’t going to tell her he wanted her body, however finely made she was. He’d only end the same way as Del. So he told the truth.
“I want to live,” he said. “I want to go home to my wife and my kids and pretend this never happened.”
“You can never do that,” she replied.
“I could!” he insisted. “I swear I could!”
“You wouldn’t come after me, for killing your friend?”
“You won’t kill him,” Geoffrey said, thinking perhaps he was making some headway with the woman. She’d had her fun, hadn’t she? She’d successfully terrorized them both, reduced him to a quivering mess and Delbert to a human dildo. What more did she need? “If you let us go, we won’t say a word. I promise. Not one word.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” the woman replied. She was standing between Geoffrey’s legs now. He felt horribly vulnerable.
“Let me at least help Delbert,” he begged. “He’s not done any harm to you. He’s a good family man and—”
“The world’s filled with family men,” she said contemptuously.
“For pity’s sake, he’s not done you any harm.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, exasperated. “Help him, then, if you must.”
He watched her warily as he scrambled to his feet, anticipating a blow or a kick but none came. Instead she allowed him to go to Delbert, whose face was by now purplish, his lips flecked with bloody spittle, his eyes rolled up beneath his fluttering lids. There was still breath in him, but precious little; his chest heaved with the effort of drawing air through his constricted windpipe. Fearing the battle was already lost he dug his fingers between cord and flesh and pulled. Del drew a faint, wheezing breath, but it was his last.
