Clive Barker - Books Of Blood Vol 6

The weeping man nodded.

'Ballard ...'he murmured. His voice was softer than the other. The beast listened.

'Tell me, Ballard -' he said,'- how does it feel?'

The beast couldn't quite make sense of the question.

'Please tell me. For curiosity's sake -'

'Damn you -' said Suckling, pressing the gun into Cripps' flesh. 'This isn't a debating society.'

'Is it good?' Cripps asked, ignoring both man and gun.

'Shut up!'

'Answer me, Ballard. How does it feel?

As he stared into Cripps' despairing eyes the meaning of the sounds he'd uttered came clear, the words falling into place like the pieces of a mosaic. 'Is it good?' the man was asking.

Ballard heard laughter in his throat, and found the syllables there to reply.

'Yes,' he told the weeping man. 'Yes. It's good.'

He had not finished his reply before Cripps' hand sped to snatch at Suckling's. Whether he intended suicide or escape nobody would ever know. The trigger-finger twitched, and a bullet flew up through Cripps' head and spread his despair across the ceiling. Suckling threw the body off, and went to level the gun, but the beast was already upon him.

Had he been more of a man, Ballard might have thought to make Suckling suffer, but he had no such perverse ambition. His only thought was to render the enemy extinct as efficiently as possible. Two sharp and lethal blows did it. Once the man was dispatched, Ballard crossed over to where Cripps was lying. His glass eye had escaped destruction. It gazed on fixedly, untouched by the holocaust all around them. Unseating it from the maimed head, Ballard put in his pocket; then he went out into the rain.

It was dusk. He did not know which district of Berlin he'd been brought to, but his impulses, freed of reason, led him via the back streets and shadows to a wasteland on the outskirts of the city, in the middle of which stood a solitary ruin. It was anybody's guess as to what the building might once have been (an abbatoir? an opera-house?) but by some freak of fate it had escaped demolition, though every other building had been levelled for several hundred yards in each direction. As he made his way across the weed-clogged rubble the wind changed direction by a few degrees and carried the scent of his tribe to him. There were many there, together in the shelter of the ruin. Some leaned their backs against the wall and shared a cigarette; some were perfect wolves, and haunted the darkness like ghosts with golden eyes; yet others might have passed for human entirely, but for their trails.

Though he feared that names would be forbidden amongst this clan, he asked two lovers who were rutting in the shelter of the wall if they knew of a man called Mironenko. The bitch had a smooth and hairless back, and a dozen full teats hanging from her belly.

'Listen,' she said.

Ballard listened, and heard somebody talking in a corner of the ruin. The voice ebbed and flowed. He followed the sound across the roofless interior to where a wolf was standing, surrounded by an attentive audience, an open book in its front paws. At Ballard's approach one or two of the audience turned their luminous eyes up to him. The reader halted.

'Ssh!' said one, 'the Comrade is reading to us.'

It was Mironenko who spoke. Ballard slipped into the ring of listeners beside him, as the reader took up the story afresh.

'And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth ...'

Ballard had heard the words before, but tonight they were new.

'... and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air ...'

He looked around the circle of listeners as the words described their familiar pattern.

'... and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.''

Somewhere near, a beast was crying.

WYBURD LOOKED AT the book, and the book looked back. Everything he'd ever been told about the boy was true.

'How did you get in?' McNeal wanted to know. There was neither anger nor trepidation in his voice; only casual curiosity.

'Over the wall,' Wyburd told him.

The book nodded. 'Come to see if the rumours were true?'

'Something like that.'

Amongst connoisseurs of the bizarre, McNeal's story was told in reverential whispers. How the boy had passed himself off as a medium, inventing stories on behalf of the departed for his own profit; and how the dead had finally tired of his mockery, and broken into the living world to exact an immaculate revenge. They had written upon him; tattooed their true testaments upon his skin so that he would never again take their grief in vain. They had turned his body into a living book, a book of blood, every inch of which was minutely engraved with their histories.

Wyburd was not a credulous man. He had never quite believed the story - until now. But here was living proof of its veracity, standing before him. There was no part of McNeaFs exposed skin which was not itching with tiny words. Though it was four years and more since the ghosts had come for him, the flesh still looked tender, as though the wounds would never entirely heal.

'Have you seen enough?' the boy asked. 'There's more. He's covered from head to foot. Sometimes he wonders if they didn't write on the inside as well.' He sighed. 'Do you want a drink?'

Wyburd nodded. Maybe a throatful of spirits would stop his hands from trembling.

McNeal poured himself a glass of vodka, took a slug from it, then poured a second glass for his guest. As he did so, Wyburd saw that the boy's nape was as densely inscribed as his face and hands, the writing creeping up into his hair. Not even his scalp had escaped the authors' attentions, it seemed.

'Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?' he asked McNeal, as the boy returned with the glass. 'Like you weren't here ...?'

The boy?' McNeal said. 'He isn't here. He hasn't been here in a long time.'

He sat down; drank. Wyburd began to feel more than a little uneasy. Was the boy simply mad, or playing some damn-fool game?

The boy swallowed another mouthful of vodka, then asked, matter of factly: 'What's it worth to you?'

Wyburd frowned. 'What's what worth?'

'His skin,' the boy prompted. 'That's what you came for, isn't it?' Wyburd emptied his glass with two swallows, making no reply. McNeal shrugged. 'Everyone has the right to silence,' he said. 'Except for the boy of course. No silence for him.' He looked down at his hand, turning it over to appraise the writing on his palm. 'The stories go on, night and day. Never stop. They tell themselves, you see. They bleed and bleed. You can never hush them; never heal them.'

He is mad, Wyburd thought, and somehow the reali- sation made what he was about to do easier. Better to kill a sick animal than a healthy one.

'There's a road, you know ...' the boy was saying. He wasn't even looking at his executioner. 'A road the dead go down. He saw it. Dark, strange road, full of people. Not a day gone by when he hasn't ... hasn't wanted to go back there.'

'Back?' said Wyburd, happy to keep the boy talking. His hand went to his jacket pocket; to the knife. It comforted him in the presence of this lunacy.

'Nothing's enough,' McNeal said. 'Not love. Not music. Nothing.'

Clasping the knife, Wyburd drew it from his pocket. The boy's eyes found the blade, and warmed to the sight.

'You never told him how much it was worth,' he said.

'Two hundred thousand,' Wyburd replied.

'Anyone he knows?'

The assassin shook his head. 'An exile,' he replied. 'In Rio. A collector.'

'Of skins?'

'Of skins.'

The boy put down his glass. He murmured something Wyburd didn't catch. Then, very quietly, he said: