Clive Barker - Books of Blood 02

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 426.08KB 135 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
CLIVE BARKER”S
BOOKS OF BLOOD
Volume II
Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever We’re opened, We’re red.
DREAD
THERE IS NO delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on
any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that
subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation,
idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the
innuendo, and there, nestling at the heart of the discourse, is dread. While the nature of God, and the
possibility of eternal life goundiscussed, we happily chew over the minutiae of misery. The syndrome
recognizes no boundaries; in bath-house and seminar-room alike, the same ritual is repeated. With the
inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our
fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
While he was still at university, and afraid to speak, Stephen Grace was taught to speak of why he was
afraid. In fact not simply to talk about it, but to analyze and dissect his every nerve ending, looking for
tiny terrors.
In this investigation, he had a teacher:Quaid.
It was an age of gurus; it was their season. In universities up and down England young men and women
were looking east and west for people to follow like lambs; Steve Grace was just one of many. It was his
bad luck thatQuaidwas the Messiah he found.
They’d met in the Student Common Room.
“The name’sQuaid,” said the man at Steve’s elbow at the bar.
“Oh.”
“You’re —?”
“Steve Grace.”
“Yes. You’re in the Ethics class, right?”
“Right.”
“I don’t see you in any of the other Philosophy seminars or lectures.”
“It’s my extra subject for the year. I’m on the English Literature course. I just couldn’t bear the idea of a
year in the Old Norse classes.”
“So you plumped for Ethics.”
“Yes.”
Quaidordered a double brandy. He didn’t look that well off, and a double brandy would have just about
crippled Steve’s finances for the next week. Quaid downed it quickly, and ordered another.
“What are you having?”
Steve was nursing half a pint of luke-warm lager, determined to make it last an hour.
“Nothing for me.”
“Yes you will.”
“I’m fine.”
“Another brandy and a pint of lager for my friend.”
Steve didn’t resist Quaid’s generosity. A pint and a half of lager in his unfed system would help no end in
dulling the tedium of his oncoming seminars on ‘Charles Dickens as a Social Analyst’. He yawned just to
think of it.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Somebody ought to write a thesis on drinking as a social activity.”
Quaid studied his brandy a moment, then downed it.
“Or as oblivion,” he said.
Steve looked at the man. Perhaps five years older than Steve’s twenty. The mixture of clothes he wore
was confusing. Tattered running shoes, cords, a grey-white shirt that had seen better days: and over it a
very expensive black leather jacket that hung badly on his tall, thin frame.The face was long and
unremarkable; the eyes milky-blue, and so pale that the colour seemed to seep into the whites, leaving
just the pin-pricks of his irises visible behind his heavy glasses.Lips full, like a Jagger, but pale, dry and
un-sensual. Hair, a dirty blond.
Quaid, Steve decided, could have passed for a Dutch dope-pusher.
He wore no badges. They were the common currency of a student’s obsessions, and Quaid looked
naked without something to imply how he took his pleasures. Was he a gay, feminist, save-the-whale
campaigner; or a fascist vegetarian? What was he into, for God’s sake?
“You should have been doing Old Norse,” said Quaid.
“Why?”
“They don’t even bother to mark the papers on that course,” said Quaid.
Steve hadn’t heard about this. Quaid droned on.
“They just throw them all up into the air. Face up, an A. Face down, a B.”
Oh, it was a joke. Quaid was being witty. Steve attemp-ted a laugh, but Quaid’s face remained
unmoved by his own attempt at humour.
“You should be in Old Norse,” he said again. “Who needs Bishop Berkeley anyhow. Or Plato. Or —”
“Or?”
“It’s all shit.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve watched you, in the Philosophy Class —”
Steve began to wonder about Quaid.
“— You never take notes do you?”
“No.”
“I thought you were either sublimely confident, or you simply couldn’t care less.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Neither. I’m just completely lost.”
Quaid grunted, and pulled out a pack of cheap cigarettes. Again, that was not the done thing. You either
smoked Gauloises, Camel or nothing at all.
“It’s not true philosophy they teach you here,” said Quaid, with unmistakable contempt.
“Oh?”
“We get spoon-fed a bit of Plato, or a bit of Bentham —no real analysis. It’s got all the right markings of
course. It looks like the beast: it even smells a bit like the beast to the uninitiated.”
“What beast?”
“Philosophy. True Philosophy. It’s a beast, Stephen. Don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t -”
“It’s wild. It bites.”
He grinned, suddenly vulpine. “Yes. It bites,” he replied. Oh, that pleased him. Again, for luck: “Bites.”
Stephen nodded. The metaphor was beyond him. “I think we should feel mauled by our subject.” Quaid
was warming to the whole subject of mutilation by education. “We should be frightened to juggle the
ideas we should talk about.”
“Why?”
“Because if we were philosophers we wouldn’t be exchanging academic pleasantries. We wouldn’t be
talking semantics; using linguistic trickery to cover the real concerns.”
“What would we be doing?”
Steve was beginning to feel like Quaid’s straight man. except that Quaid wasn’t in a joking mood. His
face was set: his pinprick irises had closed down to tiny dots
We should be walking close to the beast, Steve, don’t you think? Reaching out to stroke it, pet it, milk
it—”
“What . . . er . . . what is the beast?”
Quaid was clearly a little exasperated by the pragmatism of the enquiry.
“It’s the subject of any worthwhile philosophy, Stephen. It’s the things we fear, because we don’t
understand them. It’s the dark behind the door.”
Steve thought of a door. Thought of the dark. He began to see what Quaid was driving at in his
labyrinthine fashion. Philosophy was a way to talk about fear.
“We should discuss what’s intimate to our psyches,” said Quaid. “If we don’t.. . we risk...”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Quaid’s loquaciousness deserted him suddenly.
“What?”
Quaid was staring at his empty brandy glass, seeming to will it to be full again.
“Want another?” said Steve, praying that the answer would be no.
“What do we risk?” Quaid repeated the question. “Well, I think if we don’t go out and find the beast
—”
Steve could see the punchline coming.
“- sooner or later the beast will come and find us.”
There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it’s someone else’s.
Casually, in the following week or two, Steve made some enquiries about the curious Mr Quaid.
Nobody knew his first name.
Nobody was certain of his age; but one of the secretaries thought he was over thirty, which came as a
surprise.
His parents, Cheryl had heard him say, were dead. Killed, they thought.
That appeared to be the sum of human knowledge where Quaid was concerned.
“I owe you a drink,” said Steve, touching Quaid on the shoulder.
He looked as though he’d been bitten.
“Brandy?”
“Thank you.” Steve ordered the drinks. “Did I startle you?”
“I was thinking.”
“No philosopher should be without one.”
“One what?”
“Brain.”
They fell to talking. Steve didn’t know why he’d approached Quaid again. The man was ten years his
senior and in a different intellectual league. He probably intimidated Steve, if he was to be honest about it.
Quaid’s relentless talk of beasts confused him. Yet he wanted more of the same: more metaphors: more
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
of that humourless voice telling him how useless the tutors were, how weak the students.
In Quaid’s world there were no certainties. He had no secular gurus and certainly no religion. He
seemed incapable of viewing any system, whether it was political or philosophical, without cynicism.
Though he seldom laughed out loud, Steve knew there was a bitter humour in his vision of the world.
People were lambs and sheep, all looking for shepherds. Of course these shepherds were fictions, in
Quaid’s opinion. All that existed, in the darkness outside the sheep-fold were the fears that fixed on the
innocent mutton: waiting, patient as stone, for their moment.
Everything was to be doubted, but the fact that dread existed.
Quaid’s intellectual arrogance was exhilarating. Steve soon came to love the iconoclastic ease with
which he demolished belief after belief. Sometimes it was painful when Quaid formulated a water-tight
argument against one of Steve’s dogma. But after a few weeks, even the sound of the demolition seemed
to excite. Quaid was clearing the undergrowth, felling the trees, razing the stubble. Steve felt free.
Nation, family, Church, law. All ash. All useless. All cheats, and chains and suffocation.
There was only dread.
“I fear, you fear, we fear,” Quaid was fond of saying. “He, she or it fears. There’s no conscious thing on
the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.”
One of Quaid’s favourite baiting-victims was another Philosophy and Eng. Lit. student, Cheryl Fromm.
She would rise to his more outrageous remarks like fish to rain, and while the two of them took knives to
each other’s arguments Steve would sit back and watch the spectacle. Cheryl was, in Quaid’s phrase, a
pathological optimist.
“And you’re full of shit,” she’d say when the debate had warmed up a little. “So who cares if you’re
afraid of your own shadow? I’m not. I feel fine.”
She certainly looked it. Cheryl Fromm was wet dream material, but too bright for anyone to try making
a move on her.
“We all taste dread once in a while,” Quaid would reply to her, and his milky eyes would study her face
intently, watching for her reaction, trying, Steve knew, to find a flaw in her conviction.
“I don’t.”
“No fears? No nightmares?”
“No way. I’ve got a good family; don’t have any skeletons in my closet. I don’t even eat meat, so I
don’t feel bad when I drive past a slaughterhouse. I don’t have any shit to put on show. Does that mean
I’m not real?”
“It means,” Quaid’s eyes were snake-slits, “it means your confidence has something big to cover.”
“Back to nightmares.”
“Big nightmares.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Be specific: define your terms.”
“I can’t tell you what you fear.”
“Tell me what you fear then.”
Quaid hesitated. “Finally,” he said, “It’s beyond analysis.”
“Beyond analysis, my ass!”
That brought an involuntary smile to Steve’s lips. Cheryl’s ass was indeed beyond analysis. The only
response was to kneel down and worship.
Quaid was back on his soap-box.
“What I fear is personal to me. It makes no sense in a larger context. The signs of my dread, the images
my brain uses, if you like, to illustrate my fear, those signs are mild stuff by comparison with the real
honor that”s at the root of my personality.”
“I’ve got images,” said Steve. “Pictures from childhood that make me think of —” He stopped,
regretting this confessional already.
“What?” said Cheryl. “You mean things to do with bad experiences? Falling off your bike, or something
like that?”
“Perhaps,” Steve said. “I find myself, sometimes, think-ing of those pictures. Not deliberately, just when
my concentration’s idling. It’s almost as though my mind went to them automatically.”
Quaid gave a little grunt of satisfaction. “Precisely,” he said.
“Freud writes on that,” said Cheryl.
“What?”
“Freud,” Cheryl repeated, this time making a perf-ormance of it, as though she were speaking to a child.
“Sigmund Freud: you may have heard of him.”
Quaid’s lip curled with unrestrained contempt. “Mother fixations don’t answer the problem. The real
terrors in me, in all of us, are pre-personality. Dread’s there before we have any notion of ourselves as
individuals. The thumb-nail, curled up on itself in the womb, feels fear.”
“You remember do you?” said Cheryl.
“Maybe,” Quaid replied, deadly serious.
“The womb?”
Quaid gave a sort of half-smile. Steve thought the smile said: “I have knowledge you don’t.”
It was a weird, unpleasant smile; one Steve wanted to wash off his eyes.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“You’re a liar,” said Cheryl, getting up from her seat, and looking down her nose at Quaid.
“Perhaps I am,” he said, suddenly the perfect gentleman.
After that the debates stopped.
No more talking about nightmares, no more debating the things that go bump in the night. Steve saw
Quaid irregularly for the next month, and when he did Quaid was invariably in the company of Cheryl
Fromm. Quaid was polite with her, even deferential. He no longer wore his leather jacket, because she
hated the smell of dead animal matter. This sudden change in their relationship confounded Stephen; but
he put it down to his primitive understanding of sexual matters. He wasn’t a virgin, but women were still a
mystery to him: contradictory and puzzling.
He was also jealous, though he wouldn’t entirely admit that to himself. He resented the fact that the wet
dream genius was taking up so much of Quaid’s time.
There was another feeling; a curious sense he had that Quaid was courting Cheryl for his own strange
reasons. Sex was not Quaid’s motive, he felt sure. Nor was it respect for Cheryl’s intelligence that made
him so attentive. No, he was cornering her somehow; that was Steve’s instinct. Cheryl Fromm was being
rounded up for the kill.
Then, after a month, Quaid let a remark about Cheryl drop in conversation.
“She’s a vegetarian,” he said.
“Cheryl?”
“Of course, Cheryl.”
“I know. She mentioned it before.”
“Yes, but it isn’t a fad with her. She’s passionate about it. Can’t even bear to look in a butcher’s
window. She won’t touch meat, smell meat —”
“Oh.” Steve was stumped. Where was this leading?
“Dread, Steve.”
“Of meat?”
“The signs are different from person to person. She fears meat. She says she’s so healthy, so balanced.
Shit! I”ll find —”
“Find what?”
“The fear, Steve.”
“You’re not going to . . .?” Steve didn’t know how to voice his anxiety without sounding accusatory.
“Harm her?” said Quaid. “No, I’m not going to harm her in any way. Any damage done to her will be
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
strictly self-inflicted.”
Quaid was staring at him almost hypnotically. “It’s about time we learnt to trust one another,” Quaid
went on. He leaned closer. “Between the two of us —”
“Listen, I don’t think I want to hear.”
“We have to touch the beast, Stephen.”
“Damn the beast! I don’t want to hear!”
Steve got up, as much to break the oppression of Quaid’s stare as to finish the conversation.
“We’re friends, Stephen.”
“Yes...”
“Then respect that.”
“What?”
“Silence. Not a word.”
Steve nodded. That wasn’t a difficult promise to keep. There was nobody he could tell his anxieties to
without being laughed at.
Quaid looked satisfied. He hurried away, leaving Steve feeling as though he had unwillingly joined some
secret society, for what purpose he couldn’t begin to tell. Quaid had made a pact with him and it was
unnerving.
For the next week he cut all his lectures and most of his seminars. Notes went uncopied, books unread,
essays unwritten. On the two occasions he actually went into the university building he crept around like a
cautious mouse, praying he wouldn’t collide with Quaid.
He needn’t have feared. The one occasion he did see Quaid’s stooping shoulders across the quadrangle
he was involved in a smiling exchange with Cheryl Fromm. She laughed, musically, her pleasure echoing
off the walls of the History Department. The jealousy had left Steve altogether. He wouldn’t have been
paid to be so near to Quaid, so intimate with him.
The time he spent alone, away from the bustle of lectures and overfull corridors, gave Steve’s mind time
to idle. His thoughts returned, like tongue to tooth, like fingernail to scab, to his fears.
And so to his childhood.
At the age of six, Steve had been struck by a car. The injuries were not particularly bad, but a
concussion left him partially deaf. It was a profoundly distressing experience for him; not understanding
why he was suddenly cut off from the world. It was an inexplicable torment, and the child assumed it was
eternal.
One moment his life had been real, full of shouts and laughter. The next he was cut off from it, and the
external world became an aquarium, full of gaping fish with grotesque smiles. Worse still, there were
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
times when he suffered what the doctors called tinnitus, a roaring or ringing sound in the ears. His head
would fill with the most outlandish noises, whoops and whistlings, that played like sound-effects to the
flailings of the outside world. At those times his stomach would churn, and a band of iron would be
wrapped around his forehead, crushing his thoughts into fragments, dissociating head from hand, intention
from practice. He would be swept away in a tide of panic, completely unable to make sense of the world
while his head sang and rattled.
But at night came the worst terrors. He would wake, sometimes, in what had been (before the accident)
the reassuring womb of his bedroom, to find the ringing had begun in his sleep.
His eyes would jerk open. His body would be wet with sweat. His mind would be filled with the most
raucous din, which he was locked in with, beyond hope of reprieve. Nothing could silence his head, and
nothing, it seemed, could bring the world, the speaking, laughing, crying world back to him.
He was alone.
That was the beginning, middle and end of the dread. He was absolutely alone with his cacophony.
Locked in this house, in this room, in this body, in this head, a prisoner of deaf, blind flesh.
It was almost unbearable. In the night the boy would sometimes cry out, not knowing he was making any
sound, and the fish who had been his parents would turn on the light and come to try and help him,
bending over his bed making faces, their soundless mouths forming ugly shapes in their attempts to help.
Their touches would calm him at last; with time his mother learned the trick of soothing away the panic
that swept over him.
A week before his seventh birthday his hearing returned, not perfectly, but well enough for it to seem like
a miracle. The world snapped back into focus; and life began afresh.
It took several months for the boy to trust his senses again. He would still wake in the night,
half-anticipating the head-noises.
But though his ears would ring at the slightest volume of sound, preventing Steve from going to rock
concerts with the rest of the students, he now scarcely ever noticed his slight deafness.
He remembered, of course. Very well. He could bring back the taste of his panic; the feel of the iron
band around his head. And there was a residue of fear there; of the dark, of being alone.
But then, wasn’t everyone afraid to be alone? To be utterly alone.
Steve had another fear now, far more difficult to pin down.
Quaid.
In a drunken revelation session he had told Quaid about his childhood, about the deafness, about the
night terrors.
Quaid knew about his weakness: the clear route into the heart of Steve’s dread. He had a weapon, a
stick to beat Steve with, should it ever come to that. Maybe that was why he chose not to speak to
Cheryl (warn her, was that what he wanted to do?) and certainly that was why he avoided Quaid.
The man had a look, in certain moods, of malice. Nothing more or less. He looked like a man with
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
摘要：

  CLIVEBARKER”SBOOKSOFBLOOD VolumeII      Everybodyisabookofblood;WhereverWe’reopened,We’rered.DREAD THEREISNOdelighttheequalofdread.Ifitwerepossibletosit,invisible,betweentwopeopleonanytrain,inanywaitingroomoroffice,theconversationoverheardwouldtimeandagaincircleonthatsubject.Certainlythedebatemigh...

展开>> 收起<<
Clive Barker - Books of Blood 02.pdf

共135页,预览27页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：135 页 大小：426.08KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 135
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注