Clive Barker - Weave World

She was frightened to touch him, for fear of discovering the worst, all the while knowing that she was the only help he had. His head was turned towards her, his eyes closed, his mouth open, trailing blood-tinged spittle. Instinctively, her hand went to his hair, as if she might stroke him awake, but pragmatism had not entirely deserted her, and instead her fingers sought the pulse in his neck. It was weak.

So the grief begins, Immacolata had said, mere minutes before. Had she known, even as she offered that prophecy, that Cal was half way to dying already?

Of course she'd known. Known, and welcomed the grief this would bring, because she wanted Suzanna's pleasure in the menstruum soured from its discovery; wanted them sisters in sorrow.

Distracted by the realization she focused again on Cal to find that her hand had left his neck and was once again stroking his hair. Why was she doing this? He wasn't a sleeping child. He was hurt; he needed more concrete help. But even as she rebuked herself she felt the menstruum start to rise from her lower abdomen, washing her entrails, and lungs and heart, and moving - without any conscious instruction - down her arm towards Cal. Before, it had been indifferent to his wounding; you know how these Cuckoos are, it had said to her. But her rage, or perhaps her sadness, had chastened it. Now she felt its energies carry her need to wake him, to heal him, through the palm of her hand and into his sealed head.

It was both an extraordinary sensation, and one she felt perfectly at ease with. When, at the last moment, it seemed not to want to go, she pressed it forward and it obeyed her, its stream flowing into him. It was hers to control, she realized, with a rush of exhilaration, which was followed immediately by an ache of loss as the body below her drank the torment down.

He was greedy for healing. Her joints began to jitter as the

menstruum ran from her, and in her skull that alien song rose like a dozen sirens. She tried to take her hand from his head, but her muscles wouldn't obey the imperative. The menstruum had taken charge of her body, it seemed. She'd been too hasty, assuming control would be easy. It was deliberately depleting itself, to teach her not to press it.

An instant before she passed out, it decided enough was enough, and removed her hand. The flow was abruptly stemmed. She put her shaking hands up to her face, Cal's scent on her fingertips. By degrees the whine in her skull wound down. The faintness began to pass.

‘Are you all right?' Cal asked her.

She dropped her hands and looked across at him. He'd raised himself from the ground, and was now gingerly investigating his bloodied mouth.

‘I think so,' she said. ‘You?'

Til do,' he replied. ‘I don't know what happened ...' The words trailed away as the memory came back, and a look of alarm crossed his face.

‘The carpet-'

He hauled himself to his feet, looking all around.

‘-I had it in my hand,' he said. ‘Jesus, I had it in my hand!'

‘They've taken it!' she said.

She thought he was going to cry, the way his features crumpled up, but it was rage that emerged.

‘Fucking Shadwell!' he shouted, sweeping a copse of table-lamps off the top of a chest-of-drawers. ‘I'll kill him! I swear-'

She stood up still feeling giddy, and her downcast eyes caught sight of something in the litter of broken glass beneath their feet - she stooped again; cleared the fragments, and there was a piece of the carpet. She picked it up.

‘They didn't get it all,' she said, offering the find to Cal.

The anger melted from his face. He took it from her almost reverentially, and studied it. There were half a dozen motifs worked into the piece, though he could make no sense of them.

Suzanna watched him. He held the fragment so delicately,

as though it might bruise. Then he sniffed, hard, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

‘Fucking Shadwell.' he said again, but softly now; numbly.

‘What do we do now?' she wondered aloud.

He looked up at her. This time there were tears in his eyes.

‘Get out of here,' he said. ‘See what the sky says.'

‘Huh?'

He offered a tiny smile.

‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead. The other powerless to be born ‘

Matthew Arnold The Grande Chartreuse

I

THE RIVER

The defeat they'd sustained was utter. The Salesman had snatched the Weave from Cal's very fingers. But, though they had nothing to be jubilant about, they had at least survived the clash. Was it simply that fact that made his spirits rise when they stepped out of the warehouse into the warm air?

It smelt of the Mersey; of silt and salt. And it was there -at Suzanna's instigation - they went. They walked without exchanging a word, down Jamaica Street to the Dock Road, then followed the high, black wall that bounded the docks until they found a gate that gave them access to the wharfs. The region was deserted. It was years since the last of the big cargo vessels had berthed here to unload. They wandered through a ghost-town of empty warehouses to the river itself, Cal's gaze creeping back, and back again, to the face of the woman at his side. There was some change in her, he sensed; some freight of hidden feeling which he couldn't unlock. The poet had something to say on the subject. ‘Lost for words, boy?' he piped up in Cal's head. ‘She's a strange one, isn't she?'

That was certainly the truth. From his first sight of her at the bottom of the stairs, she'd seemed haunted. They had that in common. They shared too the same determination, fuelled perhaps by an unspoken fear that they'd lose sight of the mystery they'd dreamt of for so long. Or was he kidding himself, reading lines from his own story into her face? Was it

just his eagerness to find an ally that made him see similarities between them?

She was staring into the river, snakes of sunlight from the water playing on her face. He'd known her only a night and a day, but she awoke in him the same contradictions - unease and profound contentment; a sense that she was both familiar and unknown - that his first glimpse of the Fugue had aroused.

He wanted to tell her this, and more, if he could just find the words.

But it was Suzanna who spoke first.

‘I saw Immacolata,' she said, ‘while you were facing Shadwell...'

‘Yes?'

‘... I don't quite know how to explain what happened ...'

She began haltingly, still staring at the river as though mesmerized by its motion. He understood some of what she was telling him. That Mimi was part of the Seerkind, the occupants of the Fugue; and Suzanna, her granddaughter, had that people's blood in her. But when she began to talk about the menstruum, the power she'd somehow inherited, or plugged into, or both, he lost any hold on what she was saying. In part because her talk became vaguer, dreamier; in part because staring at her as she struggled to find the words for her feelings gave him the words for his own.

‘I love you,' he said. She had stopped trying to describe the torrent of the menstruum; just given herself over to the rhythm of the water as it lapped against the wharf.

He wasn't sure she'd heard him. She didn't move; didn't speak.

Finally, she just said his name.

He suddenly felt foolish. She didn't want professions of love from him; her thoughts were somewhere else entirely. In the Fugue, perhaps, where - after this afternoon's revelations -she had more right to be than he.

‘I'm sorry,' he muttered, attempting to cover his faux pas with further fumblings. ‘I don't know why I said that. Forget I spoke.'

His denial stung her from her trance. Her gaze left the river and found his face, a look of hurt in her eyes, as though drawing her gaze from its brilliance pained her.