by Clive Barker
But I followed, slipping and sliding over the sweaty rocks, ploughing through the tangle of seaweed, back the way we'd come.
On the other side of the island was his poor hope of life. A rowing boat, dragged up on the shingle: an inconsequential walnut shell of a boat.
Would we go to sea in that, like the three men in a sieve? He dragged me, unresisting, towards our deliverance. With every step I became more certain that the beach would suddenly rise up and stone us to death. Maybe make a wall of itself, a tower even, when we were within a single step of safety. It could play any game it liked, any game at all. But then, maybe the dead didn't like games. Games are about gambles, and the dead had already lost. Maybe the dead act only with the arid certainty of mathematicians.
He half threw me into the boat, and began to push it out into the thick tide. No walls of stones rose to prevent our escape. No towers appeared, no slaughtering hail. Even the attack on the "Emmanuelle' had ceased.
Had they sated themselves on three victims? Or was it that the presence of the sheep-feeder, an innocent, a servant of these willful dead, would protect me from their tantrums?
The rowing-boat was off the shingle. We bobbed a little on the backs of a few limp waves until we were deep enough for the oars, and then we were pulling away from the shore and my saviour was sitting opposite me, rowing for all he was worth, a dew of fresh sweat on his forehead, multiplying with every pull.
The beach receded; we were being set free. The sheep-feeder seemed to relax a little. He gazed down at the swill of dirty water in the bottom of the boat and drew in half a dozen deep breaths; then he looked up at me, his wasted face drained of expression.
"One day, it had to happen -” he said, his voice low and heavy. "Somebody would spoil the way we lived. Break the rhythm."
It was almost soporific, the hauling of the oars, forward and back. I wanted to sleep, to wrap myself up in the tarpaulin I was sitting on, and forget. Behind us, the beach was a distant line. I couldn't see the "Emmanuelle'.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"Back to Tiree," he replied. "We'll see what's to be done there. Find some way to make amends; to help them sleep soundly again."
"Do they eat the sheep?"
"What good is food to the dead? No. No, they have no need of mutton. They take the beasts as a gesture of remembrance."
Remembrance.
I nodded.
"It's our way of mourning them -”
He stopped rowing, too heartsick to finish his explanation, and too exhausted to do anything but let the tide carry us home. A blank moment passed. Then the scratching.
A mouse-noise, no more, a scrabbling at the underside of the boat like a man's nails tickling the planks to be let in. Not one man: many. The sound of their entreaties multiplied, the soft dragging of rotted cuticles across the wood.
In the boat, we didn't move, we didn't speak, we didn't believe. Even as we heard the worst – we didn't believe the worst.
A splash off to starboard; I turned and he was coming towards me, rigid in the water, borne up by unseen puppeteers like a figure-head. It was Ray; his body covered in killing bruises and cuts: stoned to death then brought, like a gleeful mascot, like proof of power, to spook us. It was almost as though he were walking on water, his feet just hidden by the swell, his arms hanging loosely by his side as he was hauled towards the boat. I looked at his face: lacerated and broken. One eye almost closed, the other smashed from its orbit.
Two yards from the boat, the puppeteers let him sink back into the sea, where he disappeared in a swirl of pink water.
"Your companion?" said the sheep-feeder.
I nodded. He must have fallen into the sea from the stern of the "Emmanuelle'. Now he was like them, a drowned man. They'd already claimed him as their play-thing. So they did like games after all, they hauled him from the beach like children come to fetch a playmate, eager that he should join the horseplay.
The scratching had stopped. Ray's body had disappeared altogether. Not a murmur off the pristine sea, just the slop of the waves against the boards of the boat.
I pulled at the oars "Row!" I screamed at the sheep-feeder. "Row, or they'll kill us."
He seemed resigned to whatever they had in mind to punish us with. He shook his head and spat onto the water. Beneath his floating phlegm something moved in the deep, pale forms rolled and somersaulted, too far down to be clearly seen. Even as I watched they came floating up towards us, their sea-corrupted faces better defined with every fathom they rose, their arms outstretched to embrace us.
A shoal of corpses. The dead in dozens, crab-cleaned and fish-picked, their remaining flesh scarcely sitting on their bones.
The boat rocked gently as their hands reached up to touch it.
The look of resignation on the sheep-feeder's face didn't falter for a moment as the boat was shaken backwards and forwards; at first gently, then so violently we were beaten about like dolls. They meant to capsize us, and there was no help for it. A moment later, the boat tipped over.
The water was icy; far colder than I'd anticipated, and it took the breath away. I'd always been a fairly strong swimmer. My strokes were confident as I began to swim from the boat, cleaving through the white water. The sheep-feeder was less lucky. Like many men who live with the sea, he apparently couldn't swim. Without issuing a cry or a prayer, he sank like a stone.
What did I hope? That four was enough: that I could be left to thumb a current to safety? Whatever hopes of escape I had, they were short-lived.
I felt a soft, oh so very soft, brushing of my ankles and my feet, almost a caress. Something broke surface briefly close to my head. I glimpsed a grey back, as of a large fish. The touch on my ankle had become a grasp. A pulpy hand, mushed by so long in the water, had hold of me, and inexorably began to claim me for the sea. I gulped what I knew to be my last breath of air, and as I did so Ray's head bobbed no more than a yard from me. I saw his wounds in clinical detail – the water cleansed cuts were ugly flaps of white tissue, with a gleam of bone at their core. The loose eye had been washed away by now, his hair, flattened to his skull, no longer disguised the bald patch at his crown.
The water closed over my head. My eyes were open, and I saw my hard-earned breath flashing past my face in a display of silver bubbles. Ray was beside me, consoling, attentive. His arms floated over his head as though he were surrendering. The pressure of the water distorted his face, puffing his cheeks out, and spilling threads of severed nerves from his empty eye-socket like the tentacles of a tiny squid.
I let it happen. I opened my mouth and felt it fill with cold water. Salt burned my sinuses- the cold stabbed behind my eyes. I felt the brine burning down my throat, a rush of eager water where water shouldn't go – flushing air from my rubes and cavities 'til my system was overwhelmed.
Below me, two corpses, their hair swaying loosely in the current, hugged my legs. Their heads lolled and danced on rotted ropes of neck-muscle, and though I pawed at their hands, and their flesh came off the bone in grey, lace-edged pieces, their loving grip didn't falter. They wanted me, oh how dearly they wanted me.
Ray was holding me too, wrapping me up, pressing his face to mine. There was no purpose in the gesture I suppose. He didn't know or feel, or love or care. And I, losing my life with every second, succumbing to the sea absolutely, couldn't take pleasure in the intimacy that I'd longed for.
Too late for love; the sunlight was already a memory. Was it that the world was going out – darkening towards the edges as I died – or that we were now so deep the sun couldn't penetrate so far? Panic and terror had left me – my heart seemed not to beat at all – my breath didn't come and go in anguished bursts as it had. A kind of peace was on me.
Now the grip of my companions relaxed, and the gentle tide had its way with me. A rape of the body: a ravaging of skin and muscle, gut, eye, sinus, tongue, brain.
Time had no place here. The days may have passed into weeks, I couldn't know. The keels of boa
ts glided over and maybe we looked up from our rock-hovels on occasion and watched them pass. A ringed finger was trailed in the water, a splashless puddle clove the sky, a fishing line trailed a worm. Signs of life.
Maybe the same hour as I died, or maybe a year later, the current sniffs me out of my rock and has some mercy. I am twitched from amongst the sea-anemones and given to the tide. Ray is with me. His time too has come. The sea-change has occurred; there is no turning back for us.
Relentlessly the tide bears us – sometimes floating, bloated decks for gulls, sometimes half-sunk and nibbled by fish – bears us towards the island. We know the surge of the shingle, and hear, without ears, the rattle of the stones.
The sea has long since washed the plate clean of its leavings. Angela, the "Emmanuelle', and Jonathan, are gone. Only we drowned belong here, face up, under the stones, soothed by the rhythm of tiny waves and the absurd incomprehension of sheep.
XVI: HUMAN REMAINS
Some trades are best practised by daylight, some by night. Gavin was a professional in the latter category. In midwinter, in midsummer, leaning against a wall, or poised in a doorway, a fire-fly cigarette hovering at his lips, he sold what sweated in his jeans to all comers.
Sometimes to visiting widows with more money than love, who'd hire him for a weekend of illicit meetings, sour, insistent kisses and perhaps, if they could forget their dead partners, a dry hump on a lavender-scented bed. Sometimes to lost husbands, hungry for their own sex and desperate for an hour of coupling with a boy who wouldn't ask their name.
Gavin didn't much care which it was. Indifference was a trade-mark of his, even a part of his attraction. And it made leaving him, when the deed was done and the money exchanged, so much simpler. To say, "Ciao', or "Be seeing you', or nothing at all to a face that scarcely cared if you lived or died: that was an easy thing.
And for Gavin, the profession was not unpalatable, as professions went. One night out of four it even offered him a grain of physical pleasure. At worst it was a sexual abattoir, all steaming skins and lifeless eyes. But he'd got used to that over the years.
It was all profit. It kept him in good shoes.
By day he slept mostly, hollowing out a warm furrow in the bed, and mummifying himself in his sheets, head wrapped up in a tangle of arms to keep out the light. About three or so, he'd get up, shave and shower, then spend half an hour in front of the mirror, inspecting himself. He was meticulously self-critical, never allowing his weight to fluctuate more than a pound or two to either side of his self-elected ideal, careful to feed his skin if it was dry, or swab it if it was oily, hunting for any pimple that might flaw his cheek. Strict watch was kept for the smallest sign of venereal disease – the only type of lovesickness he ever suffered. The occasional dose of crabs was easily dispatched, but gonorrhea, which he'd caught twice, would keep him out of service for three weeks, and that was bad for business; so he policed his body obsessively, hurrying to the clinic at the merest sign of a rash.
It seldom happened. Uninvited crabs aside there was little to do in that half-hour of self-appraisal but admire the collision of genes that had made him. He was wonderful. People told him that all the time. Wonderful. The face, oh the face, they would say, holding him tight as if they could steal a piece of his glamour.
Of course there were other beauties available, through the agencies, even on the streets if you knew where to search. But most of the hustlers Gavin knew had faces that seemed, beside his, unmade. Faces that looked like the first workings of a sculptor rather than the finished article: unrefined, experimental. Whereas he was made, entire. All that could be done had been; it was just a question of preserving the perfection.
Inspection over, Gavin would dress, maybe regard himself for another five minutes, then take the packaged wares out to sell.
He worked the street less and less these days. It was chancy; there was always the law to avoid, and the occasional psycho with an urge to clean up Sodom. If he was feeling really lazy he could pick up a client through the Escort Agency, but they always creamed off a fat portion of the fee.
He had regulars of course, clients who booked his favours month after month. A widow from Fort Lauderdale always hired him for a few days on her annual trip to Europe; another woman whose face he'd seen once in a glossy magazine called him now and then, wanting only to dine with him and confide her marital problems. There was a man Gavin called Rover, after his car, who would buy him once every few weeks for a night of kisses and confessions.
But on nights without a booked client he was out on his own finding a spec and hustling. It was a craft he had off perfectly. Nobody else working the street had caught the vocabulary of invitation better; the subtle blend of encouragement and detachment, of putto and wanton. The particular shift of weight from left foot to right that presented the groin at the best angle: so. Never too blatant: never whorish. Just casually promising.
He prided himself that there was seldom more than a few minutes between tricks, and never as much as an hour. If he made his play with his usual accuracy, eyeing the right disgruntled wife, the right regretful husband, he'd have them feed him (clothe him sometimes), bed him and bid him a satisfied goodnight all before the last tube had run on the Metropolitan Line to Hammersmith. The years of half-hour assignations, three blow- jobs and a fuck in one evening, were over. For one thing he simply didn't have the hunger for it any longer, for another he was preparing for his career to change course in the coming years: from street hustler to gigolo, from gigolo to kept boy, from kept boy to husband. One of these days, he knew it, he'd marry one of the widows; maybe the matron from Florida. She'd told him how she could picture him spread out beside her pool in Fort Lauderdale, and it was a fantasy he kept warm for her. Perhaps he hadn't got there yet, but he'd turn the trick of it sooner or later. The problem was that these rich blooms needed a lot of tending, and the pity of it was that so many of them perished before they came to fruit.
Still, this year. Oh yes, this year for certain, it had to be this year. Something good was coming with the autumn, he knew it for sure.
Meanwhile he watched the lines deepen around his wonderful mouth (it was, without doubt, wonderful) and calculated the odds against him in the race between time and opportunity.
It was nine-fifteen at night. September 29th, and it was chilly, even in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel. No Indian summer to bless the streets this year: autumn had London in its jaws and was shaking the city bare.
The chill had got to his tooth, his wretched, crumbling tooth. If he'd gone to the dentist's, instead of turning over in his bed and sleeping another hour, he wouldn't be feeling this discomfort. Well, too late now, he'd go tomorrow. Plenty of time tomorrow. No need for an appointment. He'd just smile at the receptionist, she'd melt and tell him she could find a slot for him somewhere, he'd smile again, she'd blush and he'd see the dentist then and there instead of waiting two weeks like the poor nerds who didn't have wonderful faces.
For tonight he'd just have to put up with it. All he needed was one lousy punter – a husband who'd pay through the nose for taking it in the mouth – then he could retire to an all-night club in Soho and content himself with reflections. As long as he didn't find himself with a confession-freak on his hands, he could spit his stuff and be done by half ten. But tonight wasn't his night. There was a new face on the reception desk of the Imperial, a thin, shot-at face with a mismatched rug perched (glued) on his pate, and he'd been squinting at Gavin for almost half an hour.
The usual receptionist, Madox, was a closet-case Gavin had seen prowling the bars once or twice, an easy touch if you could handle that kind. Madox was putty in Gavin's hand; he'd even bought his company for an hour a couple of months back. He'd got a cheap rate too – that was good politics. But this new man was straight, and vicious, and he was on to Gavin's game.
Idly, Gavin sauntered across to the cigarette machine, his walk catching the beat of the muzack as he trod the maroon carpet. Lousy fucking night.<
br />
The receptionist was waiting for him as he turned from the machine, packet of Winston in hand.
"Excuse me… Sir." It was a practised pronunciation that was clearly not natural. Gavin looked sweetly back at him.
"Yes?"
"Are you actually a resident at this hotel… Sir?"
"Actually -”
"If not, the management would be obliged if you'd vacate the premises immediately."
"I'm waiting for somebody."
"Oh?"
The receptionist didn't believe a word of it.
"Well just give me the name -”
"No need."
"Give me the name -”, the man insisted, “and I'll gladly check to see if your… contact… is in the hotel."
The bastard was going to try and push it, which narrowed the options. Either Gavin could choose to play it cool, and leave the foyer, or play the outraged customer and stare the other man down. He chose, more to be bloody-minded than because it was good tactics, to do the latter.
"You don't have any right -” he began to bluster, but the receptionist wasn't moved.
"Look, sonny -” he said, "I know what you're up to, so don't try and get snotty with me or I'll fetch the police." He'd lost control of his elocution: it was getting further south of the river with every syllable. "We've got a nice clientele here, and they don't want no truck with the likes of you, see?"'Fucker," said Gavin very quietly.
"Well that's one up from a cocksucker, isn't it?"
Touchй.
"Now, sonny – you want to mince out of here under your own steam or be carried out in cuffs by the boys in blue?"
Gavin played his last card.
"Where's Mr. Madox? I want to see Mr. Madox: he knows me."
"I'm sure he does," the receptionist snorted, "I'm bloody sure he does. He was dismissed for improper conduct -” The artificial accent was re-establishing itself' – “So I wouldn't try dropping his name here if I were you. OK? On your way."
Upper hand well and truly secured, the receptionist stood back like a matador and gestured for the bull to go by.
