Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

He was not disturbed in the least by their distortions; nor by the holes in their wretched bodies, or their slashed and severed limbs. It was nothing he hadn't seen in comic books by the age of six; or on a ghost-train ride. The horrors were everywhere, if you wanted to look. On bubble-gum cards, and Saturday morning cartoons, or in the stores on T-shirts and album covers. He smiled to think of that. There were outposts of his empire everywhere. No place was untouched by the Death-Boy's finger.

The speediest of these, his first devotees, was a man who looked to have died young, and recently. He wore a pair of jeans two sizes too big for him, and a muscle shirt adorned with a hand presenting the fuck sign to the world. He also wore a hat, which he took off when he came within a few yards of Tommy-Ray. The head beneath had been practically shaved, exposing several long cuts to view. The fatal wounds, presumably. There was no blood out of them now; just a whine of the wind that blew through the man's gut.

A little distance from Tommy-Ray he stopped.

"Do you speak?" the Death-Boy asked him.

The man opened his mouth, which was already wide, a little wider, and proceeded to make a reply as best he could, by working it up from his throat. Watching him, Tommy-Ray remembered a performer he'd seen on a late show, who'd swallowed and then regurgitated live goldfish. Though it was several years ago the sight had struck a chord in Tommy-Ray's imagination. The spectacle of a man able to reverse his system by practice, vomiting up what he'd held in his throat—not in the stomach surely; no fish, however scaly, could survive in acid—had been worth the queasiness he'd felt while watching. Now the Fuck-You-Man was giving a similar performance, only with words instead of fishes. They came at last, but dry as his innards.

"Yes," he said, "I speak."

"Do you know who I am?" Tommy-Ray asked.

The man made a moan.

"Yes or no?"

"No."

"I'm the Death-Boy, and you're the Fuck-You-Man. How 'bout that? Don't we make a pair?"

"You're here for us," the dead man said.

"What do you mean?"

"We're not buried. Not blessed."

"Don't look at me for help," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm burying nobody. I came to look because this is my kind of place now. I'm going to be King of the Dead."

"Yes?"

"Depend on it."

Another of the lost souls—a wide hipped woman—had approached, and puked up some words of her own.

"You..." she said, "...are shining."

"Yeah?" said Tommy-Ray. "Doesn't surprise me. You're bright too. Real bright."

"We belong together," the woman said.

"All of us," said a third cadaver.

"Now you're getting the picture."

"Save us," said the woman.

"I already told the Fuck-You-Man," Tommy-Ray said, "I'm burying nobody."

"We'll follow you," the woman, said.

"Follow?" Tommy-Ray replied, a shudder of excitement running down his spine at the idea of returning to the Grove with such a congregation in tow. Maybe there were other places he could visit along the way, and swell the numbers as he went.

"I like the idea," he said. "But how?"

"You lead. We'll follow," came the response.

Tommy-Ray stood up. "Why not?" he said, and started back towards the car. Even as he went he found himself thinking: this is going to be the end of me...

And thinking, didn't care.

Once at the wheel he looked back towards the cemetery. A wind had blown up from somewhere, and in it he saw the company that he'd chosen to keep seem to dissolve, their bodies coming undone as though they were made of sand, and being blown apart. Specks of their dust blew in his face..He squinted against it, unwilling to look away from the spectacle. Though their bodies were disappearing he could still hear their howls. They were like the wind, or were the wind, making their presence known. With their dissolution complete he turned from the blast, and put his foot on the accelerator. The car leapt forward, kicking up another spurt of dust to join the pursuing dervishes.

He had been right about there being more places along the route to gather ghosts. I'll always be right from now on, he thought. Death's never wrong; never, ever wrong. He found another cemetery within an hour's drive of the first, with a dust dervish of half-dissolved souls running back and forth along its front wall like a dog on a leash, impatiently awaiting the arrival of its master. Word of his coming had gone before him apparently. They were waiting, these souls, ready to join the throng. He didn't even have to slow the car. At his approach the dust storm came to meet him,, momentarily smothering the vehicle before rising to join the souls behind. Tommy-Ray just drove straight on.

Towards dawn his unhappy band found yet more adherents. There had been a collision at a crossroads, earlier in the night. There was broken glass scattered across the road; blood; and one of the two cars—now barely recognizable as such— overturned at the side of the road. He slowed to look, not expecting there to be any haunters here, but even as he did so he heard the now familiar whining wind and saw two wretched forms, a man and a woman, appear from the darkness. They'd not yet got the trick of their condition. The wind that blew through them, or out of them, threatened with every faltering step they took to throw them over on to their broken heads. But newly dead as they were, they sensed their Lord in Tommy-Ray, and came obediently. He smiled to see them; their fresh wounds (glass in their faces, in their eyes) excited him.

There was no exchange of words. As they drew closer they seemed to take a signal from their comrades in death behind Tommy-Ray's car, allowing their bodies to erode completely, and join the wind.

His legion swelled, Tommy-Ray drove on.

There were other such meetings along the way; they seemed to multiply the further north he drove, as though word of his approach went through the earth, from buried thing to buried thing, graveyard whispers, so that there were dusty phantoms waiting all along the way. By no means all of them had come to join the party. Some had apparently come simply to stare at the passing parade. There was fear on their faces when they looked at Tommy-Ray. He'd become the Terror in the ghost-train now, and they were the chilled punters. There were hierarchies even among the dead it seemed, and he was too elevated a company for many of them to keep; his ambition too great, his appetite too depraved. They preferred quiet rot to such adventure.

It was early morning by the time he reached the nameless hick-town in which he'd lost his wallet, but the daylight did not reveal the host in the dust storm that followed him. To any who chose to look—and few did, in such a blinding wind—a cloud of dirty air came in the car's wake; that was the sum of it.

He had other business here than the collecting of lost souls—though he didn't doubt for a moment that in such a wretched place life was quickly and violently over, and many bodies never laid to sanctified rest. No, his business here was revenge upon the pocket-picker. Or if not upon him, at least upon the den where it had happened. He found the place easily. The front door wasn't locked, as he'd expected at such an early hour. Nor, once he stepped inside, did he find the bar empty. Last night's drinkers were still scattered around the place, in various stages of collapse. One lay face down on the floor, vomit spattered around him. Another two were sprawled at tables. Behind the bar itself was a man Tommy-Ray vaguely remembered as the doorman who'd taken his money for the backroom show. A lump of a man, with a face that looked to have been bruised so many times it'd never lose the stain.

"Looking for someone?" he demanded to know.

Tommy-Ray ignored him, crossing to the door that let on the arena where he'd seen the woman and the dog performing. It was open. The space beyond was empty, the players gone home to their beds and their kennels. The barman was a yard from him when he turned back into the bar.