Clive Barker - Weave World

There were heavens it had business in, where the age it had wasted here was but a day, and its grief, all grief, an unknown state.

On the thought, it rose, it and itself one triumphant splendour.

There were clouds above. It was away between them in moments, leaving only a rain of dwindling light on the faces of those who watched it pass from sight.

‘Gone,' said Lo, when even the light had died, and there was only a gruel of snow shed from above.

‘Is it over then?' Apolline wanted to know.

‘I think it is,' said Hamel. There were tears pouring down his cheeks.

A fresh gust of wind had lent new fervour to the flames that were devouring the wood. It did not matter much. They no longer had need to take refuge there. Perhaps tonight marked an end to refuges.

Suzanna looked down at Cal, whom she was cradling as she'd once cradled Jerichau. But Jerichau had died in her arms: Cal would not; she swore he would not. He had not escaped the furnace of the jacket's destruction unmarked: the skin of his face and his chest were burned, or perhaps stained. But that was the only outward damage.

‘How is he?' said a voice she didn't know.

She looked up to meet the harried gaze of a Cuckoo like herself, muffled up in several layers of clothing.

‘Suzanna?' he said. ‘My name is Gluck. I'm a friend of Calhoun's.'

‘You're welcome,' said someone.

Gluck beamed.

‘He's not going to die,' said Suzanna, stroking Cal's face. ‘He's just sleeping awhile.'

‘He's had a busy nightI said Nimrod, and there were tears on his stoical face too, pouring down.

V

THE SLEEPWALKER

1

There was a wilderness, and Cal was dust in the wilderness, and his hopes and dreams were dust in the wilderness, all driven before the same unforgiving wind.

He had tasted Uriel's condition, before its healing. He'd shared the spirit's loneliness and desolation, and his frail mind had been snatched up into the void and left there to die. He knew no way out. In the final arithmetic his life was a wasteland: of fire, of snow, of sand. All of it, a wasteland, and he would wander there ‘til he could wander no more.

2

To those who were tending him, he seemed simply to be resting; at least at first. They let him sleep, in the belief that he'd wake healed. His pulse was strong, his bones unbroken. All he needed was time to recover his strength.

But when he woke the following afternoon, in Gluck's house, it was immediately clear that something was profoundly amiss. His eyes opened, but Cal was not in them. His gaze was devoid of recognition or response. It and he were as blank as an empty page.

Suzanna couldn't know - none of them could - what he'd shared with Uriel during their confrontation, but she could make an educated guess. If her experience of the menstruum had taught her anything it was that every exchange was a two-way street. Cal had conspired with Immacolata's jacket to give Uriel its vision, but what had the lunatic spirit given him in return?

When, after two days, there was no sign of improvement in his state, they called in expert help, but though the doctors exhausted their tests on him they could find nothing physiologically wrong. This was not a coma, they ventured, so much as a trance; and they knew no precedent for it, except perhaps sleepwalking. One of their number even went so far as to suggest the condition might be self-induced, a possibility Suzanna did not entirely dismiss.

There were no reasons they could find, they finally announced, as to why the patient wasn't up and awake and living a healthy life. There are plenty of reasons, Suzanna thought, but none that she could begin to explain. Perhaps he had simply seen too much; and the surfeit had left him indifferent to being.

3

And the dust rolled on.

Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the wind; very distant voices. But they disappeared as quickly as they came, and left him alone again. That was for the best, he knew, because if there was a place beyond this wasteland and the voices were trying to coax him back, it would bring him pain, and he was better off without it. Besides, sooner or later the inhabitants of that otherwhere would come to him. They'd wither and die and join the dust in the wilderness. That was how things happened; always had and always would.

Everything went to dust.

4

Each day Suzanna would spend several hours talking to him, telling him how the day had gone, and whom she'd met mentioning the names of people he knew and places he'd been in the hope of stirring him from his inertia. But there was no response; not a glimmer.

Sometimes she'd get into a quiet rage at his apparent indifference to her, and tell him to his vacant face that he was being selfish. She loved him, didn't he know that? She loved him and she wanted him to know her again, and be with her. Other times she'd come close to despair, and however hard she tried she couldn't stem the tears of frustration and unhappiness. She'd leave his bedside then, until she'd composed herself again, because she was fearful that somewhere in his sealed head he'd hear her grief and flee even further into himself.

She even tried to reach him with the menstruum, but he was a fortress, and her subtle body could only gaze into him, not enter. What it saw gave her no cause for optimism. It was as if he was uninhabited.

5

Outside the window of Gluck's home it was the same story: there were few signs of life. This was the hardest winter since the beginning of the century. Snow fell on snow; ice glazed ice.

As January crept to its dismal end people began not to ask after Cal as frequently. They had problems of their own in such a grim season, and it was relatively easy for them to put him out of their minds because he wasn't in pain; or at least in no pain he could express. Even Gluck tactfully suggested that she was giving too much of her time over to nursing him. She had her own healing to do; a life to be put in some sort of order; plans to be laid for the future. She'd done all that could be expected from a devoted friend, and more, he argued, and she should start to share the burden with others.

‘I can't,' she told him.

‘Why not?' he asked.

‘I love him,' she said, and ‘I want to be with him.'

That was only half the answer of course. The other half was the book.

There it lay in his room, where she'd put it the day they'd returned from Rayment's Hill. Though it had been Mimi's gift to Suzanna, the magic that it now contained meant she could no longer open it alone. Just as she'd needed Cal at the Temple, in order to use the Loom's power, and charge the book with their memories, so she needed him again if they were to reverse the process. The magic hung in the space between them. She could not reclaim on her own what they'd imagined together.

Until he woke the Stories of the Secret Places would remain untold. And if he didn't wake they'd remain that way forever.

6

In the middle of February, with the false hint of a thaw in the air, Gluck took himself off to Liverpool, and, by dint of some discreet enquiries in Chariot Street, located Geraldine Kella-way. She returned with him to Harborne to visit Cal. His condition shocked her, needless to say, but she had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon, and within an hour she'd taken it in her stride.

She returned to Liverpool after two days, back to the life she'd established in Cal's absence, promising to visit again soon.

If Gluck had hoped her appearance would do something to break the deadlock of Cal's stupor, he was disappointed. The sleepwalker went on in the same fashion, through February and early March, while outside the promised thaw was delayed and delayed.

During the day they'd move him from his bed to the window, and there he'd sit, overlooking the expanse of frost-gripped ground behind Gluck's house. Though he was fed well, chewing and swallowing with the mechanical efficiency of an animal; though he was shaved and bathed daily; though his legs were exercised to keep the muscles from wasting, it was