by Clive Barker
"It's over…" he was telling Cripps '… don't you understand plain English?" Cripps made an attempt to protest, but Suckling cut him short. "Either you come in a gentlemanly fashion or Gideon and Sheppard carry you out. Which is it to be?"
"What is this?" Cripps demanded. "You're nobody, Suckling. You're comic relief."
"That was yesterday," the man replied. "There've been some changes made. Every dog has his day, isn't that right? You should know that better than anybody. I'd get a coat if I were you. It's raining."
There was a short silence, then Cripps said: "All right. I'll come."
"Good man," said Suckling sweetly. "Gideon, go check upstairs."
"I'm alone," said Cripps.
"I believe you," said Suckling. Then to Gideon, "Do it anyway."
Ballard heard somebody move across the hallway, and then a sudden flurry of movement. Cripps was either making an escape-bid or attacking Suckling, one of the two. Suckling shouted out; there was a scuffle. Then, cutting through the confusion, a single shot.
Cripps cried out, then came the sound of him falling.
Now Suckling's voice, thick with fury. "Stupid," he said. "Stupid."
Cripps groaned something which Ballard didn't catch.
Had he asked to be dispatched, perhaps, for Suckling told him: "No. You're going back to London. Sheppard, stop him bleeding. Gideon; upstairs." Baliard backed away from the head of the stairs as Gideon began his ascent. He felt sluggish and inept. There was no way out of this trap. They would corner him and exterminate him. He was a beast; a mad dog in a maze. If he'd only killed Suckling when he'd had the strength to do so. But then what good would that have done? The world was full of men like Suckling, men biding their time until they could show their true colours; vile, soft, secret men. And suddenly the beast seemed to move in Baliard, and he thought of the park and the fog and the smile on the face of Mironenko, and he felt a surge of grief for something he'd never had: the life of a monster.
Gideon was almost at the top of the stairs. Though it could only delay the inevitable by moments, Baliard slipped along the landing and opened the first door he found. It was the bathroom. There was a bolt on the door, which he slipped into place.
The sound of running water filled the room. A piece of guttering had broken, and was delivering a torrent of rainwater onto the window-sill. The sound, and the chill of the bathroom, brought the night of delusions back. He remembered the pain and blood; remembered the shower – water beating on his skull, cleansing him of the taming pain. At the thought, four words came to his lips unbidden.
"I do not believe."
He had been heard.
"There's somebody up here," Gideon called. The man approached the door, and beat on it. "O pen up!" Baliard heard him quite clearly, but didn't reply. His throat was burning, and the roar of rotors was growing louder again. He put his back to the door and despaired.
Suckling was up the stairs and at the doo r in seconds. "Who's in there?" he demanded to know. "Answer me! Who's in there?" Getting no response, he ordered that Cripps be brought upstairs. There was more commotion as the order was obeyed.
"For the last time -” Suckling said.
The pressure was building in Ballard's skull. This time it seemed the din had lethal intentions; his eyes ached, as if about to be blown from their sockets. He caught sight of something in the mirror above the sink; something with gleaming eyes, and again, the words came – "I do not believe”- but this time his throat, hot with other business, could barely pronounce them. "Ballard," said Suckling. There was triumph in the word. "My God, we've got Ballard as well. This is our lucky day."
No, thought the man in the mirror. There was nobody of that name here. Nobody of any name at all, in fact, for weren't names the first act of faith, the first board in the box you buried freedom in? The thing he was becoming would not be named; nor boxed; nor buried. Never again.
For a moment he lost sight of the bathroom, and found himself hovering above the grave they had made him dig, and in the depths the box danced as its contents fought its premature burial. He could hear the wood splintering – or was it the sound of the door being broken down?
The box-lid flew off. A rain of nails fell on the heads of the burial party. The noise in his head, as if knowing that its torments had proved fruitless, suddenly fled, and with it the delusion. He was back in the bathroom, facing the open door. The men who stared through at him had the faces of fools. Slack, and stupefied with shock – seeing the way he was wrought. Seeing the snout of him, the hair of him, the golden eye and the yellow tooth of him. Their horror elated him.
"Kill it!" said Suckling, and pushed Gideon into the breach. The man already had his gun from his pocket and was leveling it, but his trigger-finger was too slow. The beast snatched his hand and pulped the flesh around the steel. Gideon screamed, and stumbled away down the stairs, ignoring Suckling's shouts.
As the beast raised his hand to sniff the blood on his palm there was a flash of fire, and he felt the blow to his shoulder. Sheppard had no chance to fire a second shot however before his prey was through the door and upon him. Forsaking his gun, he made a futile bid for the stairs, but the beast's hand unsealed the back of his head in one easy stroke. The gunman toppled forward, the narrow landing filling with the smell of him. Forgetting his other enemies, the beast fell upon the offal and ate.
Somebody said: "Ballard."
The beast swallowed down the dead man's eyes in one gulp, like prime oysters.
Again, those syllables."'Ballard." He would have gone on with his meal, but that the sound of weeping pricked his ears. Dead to himself he was, but not to grief. He dropped the meat from his fingers and looked back along the landing.
The man who was crying only wept from one eye; the other gazed on, oddly untouched. But the pain in the living eye was profound indeed. It was despair, the beast knew; such suffering was too close to him for the sweetness of transformation to have erased it entirely. The weeping man was locked in the arms of another man, who had his gun placed against the side of his prisoner's head.
"If you make another move," the captor said, "I'll blow his head off. Do you understand me?"
The beast wiped his mouth.
"Tell him, Cripps! He's your baby. Make him understand."
The one-eyed man tried to speak, but words defeated him. Blood from the wound in his abdomen seeped between his fingers.
"Neither of you need die," the captor said. The beast didn't like the music of his voice; it was shrill and deceitful. "London would much prefer to have you alive. So why don't you tell him, Cripps? Tell him I mean him no harm." The weeping man nodded.
"Ballard…"he murmured. His voice was softer than the other. The beast listened.
"Tell me, Ballard -” he said,"- how does it feel?"
The beast couldn't quite make sense of the question.
"Please tell me. For curiosity's sake -”
"Damn you -” said Suckling, pressing the gun into Cripps' flesh. "This isn't a debating society." "Is it good?" Cripps asked, ignoring both man and gun.
"Shut up!"
"Answer me, Ballard. How does it feel?
As he stared into Cripps' despairing eyes the meaning of the sounds he'd uttered came clear, the words falling into place like the pieces of a mosaic. "Is it good?" the man was asking.
Ballard heard laughter in his throat, and found the syllables there to reply.
"Yes," he told the weeping man. "Yes. It's good."
He had not finished his reply before Cripps' hand sped to snatch at Suckling's. Whether he intended suicide or escape nobody would ever know. The trigger-finger twitched, and a bullet flew up through Cripps' head and spread his despair across the ceiling. Suckling threw the body off, and went to level the gun, but the beast was already upon him.
Had he been more of a man, Ballard might have thought to make Suckling suffer, but he had no such perverse ambition. His only thought was to render the enemy extinct as efficiently as
possible. Two sharp and lethal blows did it. Once the man was dispatched, Ballard crossed over to where Cripps was lying. His glass eye had escaped destruction. It gazed on fixedly, untouched by the holocaust all around them. Unseating it from the maimed head, Ballard put in his pocket; then he went out into the rain.
It was dusk. He did not know which district of Berlin he'd been brought to, but his impulses, freed of reason, led him via the back streets and shadows to a wasteland on the outskirts of the city, in the middle of which stood a solitary ruin. It was anybody's guess as to what the building might once have been (an abattoir? an opera-house?) but by some freak of fate it had escaped demolition, though every other building had been leveled for several hundred yards in each direction. As he made his way across the weed-clogged rubble the wind changed direction by a few degrees and carried the scent of his tribe to him. There were many there, together in the shelter of the ruin. Some leaned their backs against the wall and shared a cigarette; some were perfect wolves, and haunted the darkness like ghosts with golden eyes; yet others might have passed for human entirely, but for their trails.
Though he feared that names would be forbidden amongst this clan, he asked two lovers who were rutting in the shelter of the wall if they knew of a man called Mironenko. The bitch had a smooth and hairless back, and a dozen full teats hanging from her belly.
"Listen," she said.
Ballard listened, and heard somebody talking in a corner of the ruin. The voice ebbed and flowed. He followed the sound across the roofless interior to where a wolf was standing, surrounded by an attentive audience, an open book in its front paws. At Ballard's approach one or two of the audience turned their luminous eyes up to him. The reader halted.
"Ssh!" said one, “the Comrade is reading to us."
It was Mironenko who spoke. Ballard slipped into the ring of listeners beside him, as the reader took up the story afresh.
"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth…" Ballard had heard the words before, but tonight they were new.
"… and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air…" He looked around the circle of listeners as the words described their familiar pattern.
"… and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."'
Somewhere near, a beast was crying.
XXX: THE BOOK OF BLOOD (A POSTSCRIPT): ON JERUSALEM STREET
Wyburd looked at the book, and the book looked back. Everything he'd ever been told about the boy was true. "How did you get in?" McNeal wanted to know. There was neither anger nor trepidation in his voice; only casual curiosity.
"Over the wall," Wyburd told him.
The book nodded. "Come to see if the rumours were true?"
"Something like that."
Amongst connoisseurs of the bizarre, McNeal's story was told in reverential whispers. How the boy had passed himself off as a medium, inventing stories on behalf of the departed for his own profit; and how the dead had finally tired of his mockery, and broken into the living world to exact an immaculate revenge. They had written upon him; tattooed their true testaments upon his skin so that he would never again take their grief in vain. They had turned his body into a living book, a book of blood, every inch of which was minutely engraved with their histories. Wyburd was not a credulous man. He had never quite believed the story – until now. But here was living proof of its veracity, standing before him. There was no part of McNeal's exposed skin which was not itching with tiny words. Though it was four years and more since the ghosts had come for him, the flesh still looked tender, as though the wounds would never entirely heal.
"Have you seen enough?" the boy asked. "There's more. He's covered from head to foot. Sometimes he wonders if they didn't write on the inside as well." He sighed. "Do you want a drink?"
Wyburd nodded. Maybe a throatful of spirits would stop his hands from trembling.
McNeal poured himself a glass of vodka, took a slug from it, then poured a second glass for his guest. As he did so, Wyburd saw that the boy's nape was as densely inscribed as his face and hands, the writing creeping up into his hair. Not even his scalp had escaped the authors' attentions, it seemed.
"Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?" he asked McNeal, as the boy returned with the glass. "Like you weren't here…?"
The boy?" McNeal said. "He isn't here. He hasn't been here in a long time."
He sat down; drank. Wyburd began to feel more than a little uneasy. Was the boy simply mad, or playing some damn-fool game?
The boy swallowed another mouthful of vodka, then asked, matter of factly: "What's it worth to you?" Wyburd frowned. "What's what worth?"
"His skin," the boy prompted. "That's what you came for, isn't it?"
Wyburd emptied his glass with two swallows, making no reply. McNeal shrugged.
"Everyone has the right to silence," he said. "Except for the boy of course. No silence for him." He looked down at his hand, turning it over to appraise the writing on his palm. "The stories go on, night and day. Never stop. They tell themselves, you see. They bleed and bleed. You can never hush them; never heal them."
He is mad, Wyburd thought, and somehow the realisation made what he was about to do easier. Better to kill a sick animal than a healthy one.
"There's a road, you know…" the boy was saying. He wasn't even looking at his executioner. "A road the dead go down. He saw it. Dark, strange road, full of people. Not a day gone by when he hasn't… hasn't wanted to go back there."
"Back?" said Wyburd, happy to keep the boy talking. His hand went to his jacket pocket; to the knife. It comforted him in the presence of this lunacy.
"Nothing's enough," McNeal said. "Not love. Not music. Nothing."
Clasping the knife, Wyburd drew it from his pocket.
The boy's eyes found the blade, and warmed to the sight.
"You never told him how much it was worth," he said.
"Two hundred thousand," Wyburd replied.
"Anyone he knows?"
The assassin shook his head. "An exile," he replied. "In Rio. A collector."
"Of skins?"
"Of skins."
The boy put down his glass. He murmured something Wyburd didn't catch. Then, very quietly, he said: "Be quick, and do it."
He juddered a little as the knife found his heart, but Wyburd was efficient. The moment had come and gone before the boy even knew it was happening, much less felt it. Then it was all over, for him at least. For Wyburd the real labour was only just beginning. It took him two hours to complete the flaying. When he was finished – the skin folded in fresh linen, and locked in the suitcase he'd brought for that very purpose – he was weary. Tomorrow he would fly to Rio, he thought as he left the house, and claim the rest of his payment. Then, Florida. He spent the evening in the small apartment he'd rented for the tedious weeks of surveillance and planning which had preceded this afternoon's work. He was glad to be leaving. He had been lonely here, and anxious with anticipation. Now the job was done, and he could put the time behind him.
He slept well, lulled to sleep by the imagined scent of orange groves.
It was not fruit he smelt when he woke, however, but something savoury. The room was in darkness. He reached to his right, and fumbled for the lamp-switch, but it failed to come on.
Now he heard a heavy slopping sound from across the room. He sat up in bed, narrowing his eyes against the dark, but could see nothing. Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he went to stand up.
His first thought was that he'd left the bathroom taps on, and had flooded the apartment. He was knee-deep in warm water. Confounded, he waded towards the door and reached for the main light-switch, flipping it on. It was not water he was standing in. Too cloying, too precious; too red.
He made a cry of disgust, and turned to haul open the door, but it was locked, and there was no key. He beat a panicked fusillade upon the solid wood, and yelled for help. His appeals
went unanswered.
Now he turned back into the room, the hot tide eddying about his thighs, and sought out the fountain- head. The suitcase. It sat where he had left it on the bureau, and bled copiously from every seam; and from the locks; and from around the hinges – as if a hundred atrocities were being committed within its confines, and it could not contain the flood these acts had unleashed.
He watched the blood pouring out in steaming abundance. In the scant seconds since he'd stepped from the bed the pool had deepened by several inches, and still the deluge came.
He tried the bathroom door, but that too was locked and keyless. He tried the windows, but the shutters were immovable. The blood had reached his waist. Much of the furniture was floating. Knowing he was lost unless he attempted some direct action, he pressed through the flood towards the case, and put his hands upon the lid in the hope that he might yet stem the flow. It was a lost cause. At his touch the blood seemed to come with fresh eagerness, threatening to burst the seams.
The stories go on, the boy had said. They bleed and bleed. And now he seemed to hear them in his head, those stories. Dozens of voices, each telling some tragic tale. The flood bore him up towards the ceiling. He paddled to keep his chin above the frothy tide, but in minutes there was barely an inch of air left at the top of the room. As even that margin narrowed, he added his own voice to the cacophony, begging for the nightmare to stop. But the other voices drowned him out with their stories, and as he kissed the ceiling his breath ran out.
The dead have highways. They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and laybys. They have turnpikes and intersections.
It was at one of these intersections that Leon Wyburd caught sight of the man in the red suit. The throng pressed him forward, and it was only when he came closer that he realised his error. The man was not wearing a suit. He was not even wearing his skin. It was not the McNeal boy however; he had gone on from this point long since. It was another flayed man entirely. Leon fell in beside the man as he walked, as they talked together. The flayed man told him how he had come to this condition; of his brother-in-law's conspiracies, and the ingratitude of his daughter. Leon in turn told of his last moments.
