Tonight, Again

by Clive Barker

  In that fine frame of mind, he brought himself to a climax, which was, not coincidentally, a gusher of adolescent fury—such as he had not produced in a decade or more. Five, six, seven white spurts, thrown up into the air by the spasms in his scrotum, and spattering down again on his tanned belly; another three smaller spurts which pushed out of his cock-head and oozed down his fist. A last, thick spasm, and it was over. He threw his head back and lay there in the cool grass, looking up at the shifting canopy of leaves, at the calm sky between the leaves, and laughed to himself. How strange the world was; how perfectly, gloriously strange.

  Unrequited

  Six months after the men in army uniform appeared at the door, and told her he was dead, she still felt him there with her, sometimes. It was eerie. She’d be going about some perfectly ordinary business—washing cutlery, watering her cacti, feeding the cat—and she’d feel his breath against the back of her neck, or his hands slipping around her waist. Her heart would quicken. Sometimes a yelp would escape her.

  Nor was this the worst of it. On several occasions her imagination took a more sexual turn, and she found herself remembering with uncanny accuracy the way he manipulated her when he wanted to get her into bed. The subtle rhythm of his hips against hers, his hands moving up her back to cradle her head, the way his mouth felt when he was speaking tender words against her neck.

  She had learned, over the years, not to resist him; he could be vicious when he was denied what he wanted. It was easier, she’d discovered, simply to let him do what he wanted to do, though his tenderness invariably disappeared once he knew he had her where he wanted her.

  He had not been a sophisticated lover, by any means. Nor, when she’d once tried to coax him into treating her with more delicacy, had he liked the implicit criticism. That night he’d been willfully brutish: he’d slapped the fat length of his erection against her labia like a teasing punishment. She’d been sore for a week.

  So why, when he’d given her so little joy, did her body remember her dead soldier so well? Why did she find herself standing at the sink imagining his fingers tweaking her nipples, or reaching between her legs? It was pitiful. She didn’t need a man that much. Any man; but especially him.

  Then the dream, one Saturday night. He was pursuing her through trees; the ground underfoot bright red, as if blood-soaked. He called after her in the darkness, but there was something wrong with his voice: it sounded curiously breathy, as though he were playing some kind of game to scare her.

  At last, she could run no further. Down she went, on the wet earth, and he was upon her, picking her up in his arms.

  What had he become, in this dream-wood? Something almost feline: pricked ears and whiskers, a wide horrid mouth. His skin was motley; smooth in places, furry in others, stained yellow and black and red.

  Powerless to resist him, she did in the dream as she’d done in life, and let him have his way. He was strong. He lifted her up off the ground, and impaled her, letting her head drop back towards the bloody dirt. His tail lashed her buttocks; he fucked her like an animal.

  There was no pleasure in it; nor pain either. She was simply his object for a time; a convenient hole for the night, or some part of the night. When he was done he let her go, and she dropped down into the muck. He stood over her for a moment, straddling her.

  She saw the dwindling thing between his legs, and the emptied sac against which it hung. It was stranger to her, in that moment, than his reconfigured face; a cluster of alien forms, devoid of significance.

  When she woke up, the cat was sitting at the bottom of the bed. She would not go near it for the next two days.

  After that, things got worse. The “visitations”, as she’d come to think of them, became more frequent. And now they weren’t limited to the house. He came to find her in public places. She’d feel his hand slipping into hers as she walked along the street, or seem to sense his gaze on her as she paid for groceries at the supermarket. Once, alone in an elevator, he came crashing against her with such force that she was thrown to the ground; on another occasion she felt him driving his dry fingers into her anus, so hard that she cried out in pain.

  She talked with only one or two people about what was happening to her. One of them, taking very seriously the idea that she might be haunted, asked her if she’d kept any of his belongings. Yes she had, she confessed. There were a few items of clothing she hadn’t been able to sort through yet. Do so, the friend suggested. The dead, left wandering, often use objects that they owned in life to orient themselves.

  “Suppose I’m that object?” she said to him.

  “Don’t be silly,” came the reply. “He didn’t own you.”

  She went home, and strengthening herself against the duty with several stiff drinks, set to work.

  There were three jackets, an old pair of pants, some shirts. She searched the pockets before she threw them away. There wasn’t much to find. Some ticket stubs, a few scraps of paper with numbers on them, and occasionally a name too; a key; some age-hardened candies. There was only one item over which she paused for a moment. An envelope, on which he’d written, in his familiar scrawl:

  All global violence begins with unrequited love.

  This wasn’t something he’d thought up; he’d never been so articulate. But plainly wherever he’d come by the quote, it had meant enough to him that he’d bothered to write it down.

  She sat and cried. Old tears, floods of them, tears she should have cried months before, and hadn’t. Tears for herself, in part; that she’d wasted so much time on him, and was now alone again. Tears for the final dispatch of his clothes; the last things that smelled of him, that carried the dust of his skin in their weave, a drop of blood from his freshly shaved neck on the collar. And tears for him, thinking of his scrawling that preposterous quote on an envelope, as he tried, perhaps, to make sense of himself in the cruel pattern of things.

  He didn’t come to her again. Perhaps it was the weeping that had exorcised him, perhaps it was the removal of his clothes. She didn’t much care about the how or why of it. He was gone, and that was all that mattered.

  One night, however, perhaps a week after she’d thrown away the clothes, she dreamed again of the red wood. She was perfectly aware she was dreaming this time, perfectly in command of herself. There was no flight, no terror, no rape. She was walking, she thought, in a place that her soldier had created: some place of battle, where the dead had soaked the earth with their blood.

  She waited for him, as though to test the fact of his exorcism. He did not come in any form.

  When she woke the morning news was bad. The war in the East had begun again. She made a silent pact with herself: that she would never again fall in love with a man in a uniform. Or if she did she would requite him so well he would lose his appetite for soldiering.

  Another Genesis

  Eve precedes Eden. Contrary to Genesis, she is not knitted from a rib. The Book simply has no room for the truth, which is this: a wandering woman, out to see the world, comes to a walled garden with her love, a serpent, following behind.

  In the spirit of the moment, she answers the call of the garden’s occupant, a lonely man, one Adam. They do the deed in the heat of the afternoon.

  The serpent seethes. He is by nature monogamous, and had planned that from his union with this woman a race of things might rise more auspicious than either parent. Sleek, fearless children who could chance themselves against the sky, in time.

  Now his dream is spoiled. He watches the lovers fuck and sleep, then sulks in an apple tree. There God sees him, and is inspired. Needing to justify His keeping Woman from this place, the Lord invents a story to frighten his creature when he wakes. Adam stirs, and God begins his lie. Outraged by what he hears, the serpent protests, but the Lord is swift. He whispers something, and the snake’s tongue is summarily slit.

  Eve sees the thing she loved writhing in the grass, blood rushing from its mouth, and rails against the Lord. What kind of Creation is
this, she demands to know, that condones such suffering? Adam joins in the complaint, and God—too proud to admit that this deception has outrun its purpose—drives them both out into the naked world.

  The serpent follows, but, seeing that Eve cannot bear to look at him, takes another road, and winds away.

  Death and begetting have begun.

  Later, of course, she dreams of him. Usually when the moon brings blood. In the days of their courtship, the serpent would drink from her, she remembers, lifting his scaly head to nuzzle the place between her legs, and coax her flow into his pink throat. But what was once an idyll is now a terror. She teaches her children that she was once almost devoured by a snake. The generations will magnify her fear.

  For his part, the serpent takes himself under a rock, and lives out an age celibate, believing, even at the last, that his lady will come and take him from his loneliness; that all will be healed between them.

  When he hears from a locust, lately returned from decimating a crop, that Eve, the sower of that crop, is dead, he ties himself into a knot of grief, and suffocates.

  Inside Out (Wasteland)

  You can't know, man."

  I supposed I couldn’t know; this one of many things, in an unknowable world. The longer the list becomes, the more there is to envy, the less there is to fear. What lies beyond us are experiences we might be destroyed by. Sometimes, within the same moment. As this, perhaps, this performance of miracle which I could only witness, as it were, from the outside.

  Though he would be inside out, of course; so perhaps this is a variant of wonderland; the roles reversed. In and out interchangeable.

  “You can’t know what it feels like.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Later maybe.”

  I asked around. He wasn’t lying about what he could do. He was, depending on who you talked to, “A whore from way back,” “a nice guy with a beautiful butt,” “a very special fellow,” or simply, and this most tellingly, “That dude.”

  He’d come up the hard way, by all accounts, been a thin, unloved man, who had found that his ass was especially accommodating. He could take whatever men wanted to give in the way of cocks and toys; then hands, then fists and arms; then two fists, then two fists and two arms.

  Then—

  “The rose.”

  It had happened quite without warning, apparently. An astonishment, grotesque and beautiful. Lying in a bed one night, having taken all that anyone could give him, he’d simply flowered.

  Later, came. He was a little high, but I was higher. Anxious, I suppose: to see something like this. I always loved the spectacle of the body, especially when it became outlandish. The milk-squirting tits of a black Mama in Chicago; the pussy that could pick up billiard balls; the man with one arm, who came if his stump was kissed.

  He undressed completely. He lay on the bed.

  “Touch me,” he said.

  I rubbed his back. He told me my hands were cold. Then he got on all fours and began to play with his butt-hole. It wasn’t the first time it had been touched tonight, I guessed. But it was the first time tonight it had flowered. Inside out it went, bright red and wet, like something you’d see at the zoo. He asked me to kiss it. I said no. He laughed, and was still laughing when I left the room.

  In my Art

  I have but

  one fear:

  that we will

  fail to be

  fearless.

  Aurora

  Aurora is getting fucked in the dirt again, giving up her puppy-fat body to the boys who come looking for her every day, or every other day, to drive her out somewhere they won’t be seen, and do it to her. Sometimes it’s the beach, sometimes it’s a field, sometimes they don’t make it as far as the beach or a field but park the car in a darkened street, and do her in the back. They pile out of the car and take turns, the strongest first. By time the runt of the gang has fucked her, they’ve all smoked, had a beer, talked about what a whore she is, and they’re ready to start again.

  So it goes on, maybe three rounds for everyone, and she just lies there while they come and go, the scabs on her nipples haven’t even healed from the last time they chewed on her. Sometimes they bleed. Sometimes she gets slapped around a little.

  Aurora was her father’s princess, until she was twelve. But her father loved somebody more; a woman whose car he fixed. He went away with her, and never came back. Now she lets the boys come and take her out in the car, and when they bring her home (sometimes they dump her, and she has to walk), she sits in her room and thinks about her father coming to hold her, and rock her, and touch her the way he used to touch her. But she knows she will never see him again, and when she catches sight of herself in the mirror, she’s glad.

  Whistling

  in the Dark

  The gynecologist only whistles when he touches her. She finds it suspicious that he’s so quietly professional when he talks to her, so scrubbed and intent as he puts on his gloves and invites her up onto the table, into the stirrups. Then when his fingers investigate her body, out of nowhere comes this breezy whistling, as though he’s out strolling with his dog.

  On the advice of friends she changes gynecologists. But the silence of the next man is more troubling than the musical accompaniment, and after two visits to the silent one, she returns, not without a certain guilty pleasure, to the whistler’s stirrups.

  The Common Flesh

  From a common hole, both sister and brother came. The cock inflates from the fleshiness that describe its bounds. It is a perimeter, grown ambitious. The cunt knows itself at an earlier age; it fantasticates its forms, yes, but from the beginning it knows the wisdom of being ready to receive. The male, protruding, insistent, grows into a terrible containment, the island of his soul has a jetty like a prick, but he dare not allow anyone to land there.

  Still, death comes to heal, at last. Unmakes the man and woman alike, and lets them fall into themselves, collapsing back into the space from which they were made.

  Mr. Fred Coady

  Professes His

  Undying Love for

  His Little Sylvia

  Sure, I fell in love with her right then and there. There was no disguising it. A minute in her presence, I was her slave, and I stayed that way pretty much for the next thirty years. Even after she divorced me—all the terrible grief she gave me then—I still would have taken her back in a heartbeat.

  “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because she was the most perfectly beautiful little piece of humanity I’d ever laid my eyes on, that’s why.

  “It was strange at the beginning, sure. When we were courtin’, you know; it took some getting used to. She was this tiny creature, twenty-eight inches tall, and I was a lummox; six foot two in my bare feet. People used to look at the two of us together and they’d laugh, right in our faces. I got into more fights at the beginning…broken arms, cracked ribs. The thing was, she was such a peaceable soul, she hated to see me fightin’. So after I got my nose broken in Detroit, and I saw how upset she got about that, I promised I’d never fight again, and I pretty much kept my word on it.

  “I kept my word about the sex too. Never had any problem being faithful. A one-woman guy. Thirty years of marriage—actually thirty-one—and I never once strayed. I don’t think Sylvia did either, until the last year or two. And then it was only because that bastard was such a fancy-talker. I was never much of a talker myself. I didn’t like the high life, either. I liked to sit home with her; maybe read a book, play with the kids.

  “Sure, we had kids. The doctors said it’d be dangerous for her, but she wanted them so badly, and so did I, so we thought we’d give it a shot. She had four, easy as pie. They were all as big as her by the time they were in kindergarten.

  “Now you’re wonderin’, aren’t you? Everybody does. Everybody wonders about our life in the sack, but nobody’s ever got the balls to ask me about it. Well seeing as I’m too drunk to care, and you bought the drinks, I’ll tell you. Remember me saying
how my little Sylvia was perfect? Well she was. You saw her naked, it was like she stepped out of Playboy. She had nice titties. I could take ’em in my mouth whole, the whole thing, suck it up. She loved that. It was the same down there. She was perfect. I’d been with quite a few women before I got married, so I had something to compare her with. Let me tell you…she had the prettiest little cunt you ever saw. Pink and tight.

  “At first, I was nervous of hurtin’ her. We used to laugh, ’cause my dick, when I’m really hard, is nine and a half inches. That’s a third of her height. But she liked to fuck. Oh yessir. She liked it more than any other woman I ever met. And she wouldn’t put up with no excuses. Any time of the day or night, she’d just get naked, and waggle her tits at me. I’d lie down and she’d sit on it.

  “I was amazed at first, but she took almost all of it in her, as long as she was nice and wet. Oh, it was nice, having her on my lap like that. She couldn’t suck me, of course. Her mouth was too small. But she used to like to lick the head, and she would make me bust a nut doin’ that. Then she’d drink it all up. Better than a steak, she’d say. She didn’t have no shame about what she liked…

  “So that was my little Sylvia. She was a miracle. Really, she was. A miracle.

  “When she left me, I married again. Just to fill the void, really. Stupid. Her name was Lorraine, and she was five foot six. It didn’t work, of course, I felt oppressed. You can’t sit an ordinary woman in the crook of your arm, you know? It’s just not the same.

  “That lasted about a year. Then we decided to call it quits. No hard feelings. It just wasn’t working. I went off to Toledo, looking for Sylvia, because that was where I’d heard she was living.