Clive Barker - Weave World

The argument went back and forth while they ate their pizza and drank their champagne and the rain lashed against the window.

And then, the fluttering began in her lower belly, that she'd come to recognize as an omen. She looked towards the door, and for a sickening moment she thought the menstruum had been too late with its warning, for she saw the door open and there was Hobart, staring straight at her.

‘What is it?' Jerichau said.

His words made her realize her error. The ghost she saw was more solid than she'd ever seen before, which probably meant the event it foreshadowed was imminent.

‘Hobart,' she said. ‘And I don't think we've got much time.'

2

He made a pained face, but didn't question her authority on the matter. If she said Hobart was near, then near he was. She'd become the augurer; the witch: reading the air, and always finding bad news.

Moving was an elaborate business, because of the carpet. At each stopping-place they had to convince either the proprietor or the manager that the carpet came with them to their room. When they left, it had to be manhandled back into whichever vehicle they'd commandeered that day. All of which drew unwelcome attention. There was no alternative however. Nobody had ever promised that Heaven would be a light load to carry.

Less than thirty minutes later, Hobart pushed the door of the hotel suite open. The room was still warm with the woman's breath. But she and her nigger had gone.

Again! How many times in the last months had he stood in their litter and breathed the same air she'd breathed, and seen the shape of her body left on the bed? But always too late. Always they were ahead of him, and away, and all he was left with was another haunted room.

There would be no restful nights for him, no, nor peaceful days, until she was caught and under his thumb. Her capture had become his obsession; and her punishment too.

He knew all too well that in this decadent age, when every perversion had its apologist, she would be eloquently defended once caught. That was why he came in search of her personally, he and his few, so that he might show her the true face of the Law before the liberals came pleading. She would suffer for what she'd done to his heroes. She would cry out for mercy, and he would be strong, and deaf to her pleas.

He had an ally in this of course: Shadwell.

There was not one amongst his superiors in the Force whom he trusted as he trusted that man; they were like twin souls. He took strength from that.

And, oddly, from the book too, the book of codes that he'd taken from her. He'd had the volume studied minutely; the paper and the binding, all analysed for some hidden significance. None had been found. Which left the words and the pictures. These too had been studied by experts. The stories were apparently quite straightforward faery-tales. The illustrations, like the text, also pretended innocence.

But he wasn't fooled. The book meant something more than Once upon a time, he didn't doubt that for an instant. When he finally had the woman to himself, he'd burn its meaning from her, and no faint-heart would stop him.

They'd been more cautious after the near-miss in Newcastle. Instead of visiting major cities, where the police presence was substantial, they started to find smaller communities. That had its own disadvantages, of course. The arrival of two strangers, and a carpet, aroused curiosity and questions.

But the change of tactics worked. Never staying in any place more than thirty-six hours, and moving irrationally from town to town, village to village, the trail grew colder behind them. Days free of the hounds turned to weeks, and weeks became months, and it was almost as if their pursuers had given up the chase.

In that time Suzanna's thoughts turned often to Cal. So much had happened since that day beside the Mersey, when he'd professed love to her. She'd often wondered how much of what he'd felt had been some unconscious knowledge of how the menstruum had touched him, entered him, and how much had been love as it was conventionally understood. Sometimes she longed to pick up the ‘phone and speak to him; indeed on several occasions she'd tried to do just that. Was it paranoia that prevented her from speaking, or was there - as her instinct intimated - another presence on the line, monitoring the call? On the fourth and fifth occasions it wasn't even Cal who answered, but a woman who demanded to know who this was, and when Suzanna remained silent threatened to report her. She didn't call again; it simply wasn't worth the risk.

3

Jerichau had an opinion on the matter. ‘Mooney's a Cuckoo,' he said, when Cal's name came up in conversation. ‘You should forget him.'

‘If you're a Cuckoo, you're worth nothing, is that it?' she said. ‘What about me?'

‘You belong with us now,' he said. ‘You're Seerkind.' There's so much you don't know about me,' she said. ‘Years and years of just being an ordinary girl -' ‘You were never ordinary.'

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘Believe me, I was. Still am. Here.' She tapped her forehead. ‘Sometimes I wake up and I can't believe what's happened ... happening ... to me. When I think of the way I was.'

‘It's no use to look back,' said Jerichau. ‘No use thinking of what could have been.'

‘You don't do that any more, do you? I've noticed. You don't even talk about the Fugue.'

Jerichau smiled. ‘Why should I?' he said. ‘I'm happy as I am. With you. Maybe it'll be different tomorrow. Maybe it was different yesterday, I forget. But today, now, I'm happy. I even begin to like the Kingdom.'

4

She remembered him lost in the crowd on Lord Street; how he'd changed.

‘So what if you never saw the Fugue again?' He pondered this a moment. ‘Who knows? Better not to think about it.'

It was an improbable romance. She, learning all the time from the power inside her a new vision. He, daily more seduced by the very world whose trivialities she was seeing with clearer and clearer eyes. And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she'd been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he - whose home the Weave contained -seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret.

He talked less and less of finding a safe place for the Fugue to reside, more and more of something tantalizing he'd seen in the street or on the television.

Often now, though he stayed with her and told her she could always rely upon him, she felt she was alone.

5

And somewhere behind her, Hobart was also alone; even amongst his men, or with Shadwell, alone: dreaming of her and the scent she left to mock him, and of the brutalities he'd deliver upon her.

In these dreams his hands would be flaming, as they'd been once before, and as she fought him the flames would lick up the walls of the room, and crawl across the ceiling, until the chamber was an oven. And he'd wake with his hands in front of his face, running not with fire but sweat, glad of the Law to keep him from panic, and glad too that he was on the side of the angels.

V

OUR LADY OF THE BONES

1

These were dark days for Shadwell.

He had emerged from the Fugue in high spirits - possessed of a new breadth of purpose - only to have the world he wished so much to rule snatched from beneath his nose. Not only that, but Immacolata, to whom he might have looked for assistance, had apparently elected to remain in the Weave. She was, after all, one of the Seerkind, even though they'd spurned her. Perhaps he shouldn't be so surprised that once back on soil she'd once pretended to she'd been moved to remain there.

He was not completely bereft of company. Norris, the Hamburger King, was still at his beck and call, still content with servitude. And of course there was Hobart. The Inspector was probably insane, but that was all to the good. And he had one particular aspiration which Shadwell knew he might one day need to turn to his own ends. That was, to lead - as Hobart put it - a righteous crusade.