by Clive Barker
Graham was gone.
The growing grass still bore the print of his body, but he had disappeared. Colin and Gwen got up, bewildered. The landscape had completely altered around them. There were mountains and rivers, animals, birds and insects everywhere. And not far from where they stood, a small wood had grown up in the night, jewels of rain hanging on every branch and leaf, shimmering. And there, in a patch of brilliant sunlight amongst the trees, stood Graham, smiling and well.
They said very little, but ran and ran into the first morning of the New World. And there were people now, running like themselves upon the hills. And so they finally came to the border of the New World and the Old, and the mountains which they had crossed in the balloon were in front of them.
"Oh great," said Colin. "What do we do now? Grow wings?"
"There must be some sort of pass between them," said Graham.
"I daresay there is, but I don't fancy exploring that lot without a map."
"Yes, it's a bit dodgy," agreed Graham.
Suddenly the mountains rang with a magnificent fanfare. On the crags, eagles rose screeching from their eyries.
"I'd recognise that din anywhere," said Colin with a grin.
"The Queen," said Gwen, and as the words left her lips, a long and colorful procession emerged from between the mountains, banners snapping in the wind, trumpets blaring.
"There they are," cried Benedick, and rushing forward in excitement, fell flat on his face.
The Queen descended from her coach with a great deal of dignity, and then yelled, "Yoo-hoo! Over here!" at the top of her voice. She nearly stifled them with embraces. "I knew," she said, "all along! I knew you would succeed. Didn't I say so, Darach?"
"Yes Ma'am," replied Darach.
"Of course I did. Now! Into the coach and back to the Palace."
Wake-Robin let out a whoop of sheer joy. Everybody turned and looked at him.
"I thought you'd forgotten how," said Darach with a smile. Wake-robin grinned and bounded off down the procession, whooping and yelling as loud as he could. The mountains rang with cheers and trumpets as the procession wound its way back to the Palace.
On the journey all the adventures were recounted. The children told about the mountains and how the balloon crashed, of the Palace on Desolation's Edge, which was now no more, of the boy-King, of how Graham was stolen by the many-eyed creature that had once been Elz-raal-hiam, of the journey on the mud-river and the final battle at the pit. The Queen, for her part, described with a great deal of drama how they had stormed the walls of the Black Wolf's fortress and how the horseman leapt from the window.
"What about the rest of the horsemen?" said Gwen. "Where are they now?"
"Gone," said Darach, "when the Cloud was destroyed. Gone to be marsh-mist and shadow, from which they were made."
So they feasted and danced and told their stories over and over again in the Palace, until Darach whispered in their ears:
"It is time to go. The bridge must be closed behind you, or we'll have trouble on our hands."
They said goodbye to the Queen and Benedick.
"Come back again, won't you my dears?" she said, sniffing. "Do promise, or I shan't let you go. Goodbye, goodbye. God bless."
They left the Palace in the Queen's coach and drove through the night and the following morning to the forest. Darach's peat-roofed cottage was destroyed, as he had known it would be, but the stubborn blackbird stood on the blackened threshold and sang a welcome. No goodbye was ever as difficult as that with Darach and Wake-Robin, no parting ever meant so much. But the children felt their own world in them again, and it was sweeter than they remembered. Darach left them on the edge of the sunlit glade in which he had first found them.
"Take three steps," he said, "and the bridge will be crossed."
"I don't want to," sobbed Gwen.
"Neither do I," said Colin.
"I want to stay," said Graham. "You cannot," replied Darach.
"Even a few days?" said Colin. "Just a few?"
"No," said the old man, "but remember what you told the boy-King on Desolation's Edge, Colin."
"What was that?"
"Only that there will be other dreams. You were right."
"Wait a minute," said Colin. "How did you know that?" Darach smiled.
"I'll be seeing you," he said. Three steps. The world changed.
It was a chilly winter's evening, and it was beginning to snow in Woolton.
"I wonder if he'll ever finish his last chapter?" said Gwen. "I don't think he wanted to," said her brother.
They looked out over the city. They could see the river in the distance and the lights from the airport flashing green and white. The sickly orange from the sodium lamps along the dual carriageway tinted the sky. "I never told him about the stars," said Graham. "I said I would."
"It doesn't matter," said Gwen softly. "Perhaps he was right.. Perhaps they are holes in heaven after all."
"Yes," said Colin, looking up to see the stars sailing between the clouds. "Perhaps they are."
During the summer of 1971, Clive finished writing his first full-length novel. It was a story that he had been working on for some time, bringing it to meetings with his friends to read aloud to them, shaping and reshaping the story as he gauged their reaction across several drafts. The manuscript pages presented here – complete with an illustrated title page dedicated: ‘To Julie, Sue, Ann, Lynne, Phil, Doug and Graham, being a book for you all’ – are the culmination of those drafts. The working title of the story was The Company of Dreamers, named after his description of this group of friends. In crafting the narrative for their entertainment, he also incorporated aspects of their personalities into the characters and the finished novel, renamed The Candle in the Cloud, included a number of coded messages for them
about their fears and ambitions.
“Yes, the working title for The Candle in the Cloud was Company of Dreamers; it was this idea that we were all these dreaming characters,” Clive recalls. “Us as a little gang, a little group; people dreaming with their eyes open is
how I would now understand it – shaman – I didn’t have that vocabulary back then. But we definitely figured out there was something about this dreaming thing which was eloquent and important to us. I suppose we got it from Yeats. We got it from all kinds of romantic poetry and you can go back to painting; we were very much into symbolist painting and into pre-Raphaelites and there are constant references there to sleep and to dreams.”
The novel had evolved out of a short story called The Three Red Sails, written over six pages of lined A4 paper – much like the pages which follow – and a short story called The Last Horseman. The central idea of The Three Red Sails
– that sleeping children can create a dreamscape in which adventures become real – was developed in the next version of the story, removing the idea that dreams might facilitate the crossing of a bridge to another physical world and re- placing it with the conceit that adventures occur within a collective dream.
“One of my major obsessions is the idea that we live in worlds within worlds,” agrees Clive. “Beneath the suit- and-tie exterior, there’s an erotic and a theological and an imaginative life that all exist simultaneously. In its purest state, the dream life, we live entirely through symbols – of forbidden and hoped-for things.”
Note: extracted from ‘Liverpool Lives’ by Phil & Sarah Stokes
