Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon

"Fuck," he said.

There was nothing remotely entertaining about this dream now. He wanted it to stop. Meanwhile he felt the crop of shoots entering his other leg. He had no intention of repeating his error, so he stomped down the area of the shoots with his injured foot, and planted it there while he gingerly hoisted up his other trouser leg to examine the damage. Impossible as it seemed, the shoots had already advanced through the muscle of his calf. He could see their trajectory through his skin; they were getting steadily more ambitious as they climbed; dividing and dividing again, forming a network through his flesh. He caught hold of one at his ankle, where it pierced his skin. It was no thicker than a few braided hairs, but it wriggled around between his finger and thumb as though determined to keep on climbing, keep on growing. He tried to pull on it but a spasm of pain ran up through his leg, following the path of the shoots' advance. It had almost reached his knee.

There were tears of agony in his eyes now. He looked up at Lilith, blinking them away so as to see her better. She was still watching him.

"All right," he said. "You made your point."

She didn't reply.

"Make it stop," he told her.

She seemed to consider this for a moment, biting lightly on her lower lip as she turned the option over. As she did so he glanced down at his other foot. The plants he'd ground beneath his heel had been replaced by new growths, which were already four or five inches high, and piercing him afresh.

"Oh God, no." he said, returning his gaze to his tormentor's face. "Please. I was wrong." He barely able to get the words out, the pain was so intolerable. "Make it stop!"

Though his vision was blurred he could see her response to his plea. She was shaking her head.

"Damn you!" he said. "I made one fucking mistake! I've said I'm sorry. That should be good enough."

Something burst just above his knee. He tore at his trouser leg, ripping the fabric with such pain-inspired force that it tore all the way up to his groin. There were flowers blossoming from the meat of his knee: six or seven small florets, each giving off a stink so pungent it made him giddy to inhale it. He glanced up at the woman who'd done this to him just one last time, hoping his tongue would be inspired to make her merciful. But she'd plainly already decided she knew how this would end. She had turned her back on him, and was continuing her descent into the underworld.

Eppstadt felt a new series of eruptions in his legs, leading all the way up from his knee to his groin. The large, pale muscle of his thigh had become a veritable garden; upwards of twenty flowers had blossomed there. Blood ran from the places where they'd come forth, and it coursed around the back of his leg, soaking into the tatters of his trousers. The collected scent of the blossoms all but made him swoon. He toppled backwards, and sprawled in the shoots that were waiting for him, like a death-bed welcoming him into its final comfort.

"What the hell happened to Eppstadt?" Todd said, looking back.

The brightening day had put a layer of haze between the Hell's Mouth and the door that led up into the house. The details of Eppstadt's condition were impossible to fathom. All they could see was that for some reason the man was lying back amongst flowers.

"I thought he was in trouble a few moments ago," Jerry said. "He seemed to be crying out."

"He's not crying out now," Tammy said. "Looks like he's taking a nap."

"Crazy ... " Todd said.

"Well leave him to it, I say," Jerry remarked. If he wants to stay, that's his damn business."

There was no argument from the other two.

"After you," Jerry said, stepping aside to let Tammy cross the threshold. He followed quickly after her, with Todd on his heels.

Todd glanced back one last time at the transforming landscape. The ships had disappeared from the horizon, as though some long-awaited wind had finally come and filled their sails, and borne them off to new destinations. The little gathering of houses beside the river, with its two bridges, had been eroded by light, and even the snaking shape of the river itself was on its way to extinction. Though she'd doubted the tale Zeffer had told him it seemed now that it was true. This had been a prison painted to hold the Duke. Now that his Hunt was over and the Devil's child had been returned, the place no longer had any reason to exist.

Age was catching up with it. The heat of its painted sun was undoing it, image by image, tile by tile.

"Eppstadt!" he yelled, "Are you coming?"

But the man in the long grass didn't move, so Todd let him lie there. Eppstadt had always been a man who did what he wanted to do, and to hell with other people's opinions.

Sprawled on the ground, Eppstadt heard Todd's call, and half-thought of returning it, but he could no longer move. Several shoots had entered the base of his skull, piercing his spinal column, and he was paralyzed.

The greenery pushing up through his brain, erasing his memories as they climbed, had not yet removed every last shred of intelligence. He realized that this was the end of him. He could feel the first insinuations of shoots at the back of his throat, and an itching presence behind his eyes, where they were soon to emerge and flower but it concerned him far less than it might have done had he imagined this sitting in his office.

It wasn't the kind of death he'd had in mind when he thought of such things, but then his life hadn't been as he'd expected it to be either. He'd wanted to paint, as a young man. But he'd had not the least talent. A professor for the Art School had remarked that he'd never met a man with a poorer sense of aesthetics. What would they have thought now, those critics who'd so roundly condemned him, if they'd been here to see? Wouldn't they have said he was passing away prettily, with his head full of shoots and colour and his eyes was

He never finished the thought.

One of Lilith's flowers blossomed inside his skull, and a sudden, massive hemorrhage stopped dead every thought Eppstadt was entertaining, or would ever entertain again.

Indifferent to his death, the plants continued to press up through his flesh, blossoming and blossoming, until from a little distance he was barely recognizable as a man at all: merely a shape in the dirt, a log perhaps, where the flowers had grown with particular vigor, hungry to make the most of the sun now that it was shining so brightly.

FOUR

Tammy knew there was trouble brewing the moment she set eyes on Katya. The woman was smiling down at them beatifically, but there was no warmth or welcome in her eyes; only anger and suspicion.

"What happened?" she said, straining for lightness.

"It's over," Todd told her, coming up the stairs, his hand extended towards her in a placatory manner. No doubt he also read the signs in the woman's eyes, and didn't trust what he saw there.

"Come on," he said, laying his palm against her waist in a subtle attempt to change her direction.

"No," she said, gently pressing past him so as to go down the stairs. "I want to see."

"There's nothing to see," Jerry said.

She didn't bother to sweeten her expression for Brahms. He was her servant; nothing more nor less. "What do you mean: there's nothing to see?'

"It's all gone," he said, his tone tinged with melancholy, as though he were gently breaking the news of a death to her.

"It can't be gone," Katya snapped, pushing on past Jerry and Tammy and heading down the stairs. "The Hunt goes on forever. How could Goga ever catch the Devil's child?" She turned at the bottom of the stairs, her voice strident. "How could any man ever catch the Devil's child?"

"It wasn't a man," Tammy piped up. "It was me."

Katya's face was a picture of disbelief. Obviously if the idea of a man bringing the Hunt to an end wasn't farcical enough, the notion that a woman-especially one she held in such plain contempt-had done so, was beyond the bounds of reason.