Clive Barker - Books of Blood Vol. 1

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To my mother and father

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks must go to a variety of people. To my

English tutor in Liverpool, Norman Russell, for his

early encouragement; Pete Atkins, Julie Blake, Doug

Bradley and Oliver Parker for their good advice; to

Bill Henry, for his professional eye; to Ramsey Cambell

for his generosity and enthusiasm; to Mary Roscoe, for

painstaking translation from my hieroglyphics, and to

Marie-Noelle Dada for the same; to Vernon Conway and

Bryn Newton for faith, Hope and charity; and to Nanndu

Sautoy and Barbara Boote at Sphere Books.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

By Ramsey Cambell

THE BOOK OF BLOOD

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN

THE YATTERING AND JACK

THE CREATURE HAD taken hold of his lip and pulled

his muscle off his bone, as though removing a

Balaclava.' Still with me?

Here's another taste of what you can expect from

Clive Barker: 'Each man, woman and child in that

seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the

eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think

the city's thoughts. And they believed themselves

deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength.

Vast and mad and deathless.'

You see that Barker is as powerfully visionary as

he is gruesome. One more quote, from yet another story:

'What would a Resurrection be without a few

laughs?'

I quote that deliberately, as a warning to the

fainthearted. If you like your horror fiction

reassuring, both unreal enough not to be taken too

seriously and familiar enough not to risk spraining

your imagination or waking up your nightmares when you

thought they were safely put to sleep, these books are

not for you. If, on the other hand, you're tired of

tales that tuck you up and make sure

the night light is on before leaving you, not to

mention the parade of Good Stories Well Told which have

have been, but the tendency has also produced a good

deal of irresponsible nonsense, and there is no reason

why the whole field should look backward. When it comes

to the imagination, the only rules should be one's own

instincts, and Clive Barker's never falter. To say (as

some horror writers argue, it seems to me defensively)

that horror fiction is fundamentally concerned with

reminding us what is normal, if only by showing the

supernatural and alien to be abnormal, is not too far

from saying (as quite a few publishers' editors

apparently think) that horror fiction must be about

ordinary everyday people confronted by the alien. Thank

heaven nobody convinced Poe of that, and thank heaven

for writers as radical as Clive Barker.

Not that he's necessarily averse to traditional

themes, but they come out transformed when he's

finished with them. 'Sex, Death and Starshine' is the

ultimate haunted theatre story, 'Human Remains' is a

brilliantly original variation on the doppelganger

theme, but both these take familiar themes further than

ever before, to conclusions that are both blackly comic

and weirdly optimistic. The same might be said of 'New

Murders in the Rue Morgue', a dauntingly optimistic

comedy of the macabre, but now we're in the more

challenging territory of Barker's radical sexual

any of those. 'Scape-Goats', his island tale of terror,

actually uses that staple of the dubbed horror film and

videocassette, the underwater zombie, and 'Son of

Celluloid' goes straight for a biological taboo with a

directness worthy of the films of David Cronenberg, but

it's worth pointing out that the real strength of that

story is its flow of invention. So it is with tales

such as 'In the Hills, the Cities' (which gives the lie

to the notion, agreed to by too many horror writers,

that there are no original horror stories) and 'The

Skins of the Fathers'. Their fertility of invention

recalls the great fantastic painters, and indeed I

can't think of a contemporary writer in the field whose

work demands more loudly to be illustrated. And there's

more: the terrifying 'Pig-Blood Blues'; 'Dread', which

walks the shaky tightrope between clarity and voyeurism

that any treatment of sadism risks; more, but I think

it's almost time I got out of your way.

Here you have nearly a quarter of a million words

of him (at least, I hope you've bought all three

volumes; he'd planned them as a single book), his

choice of the best of eighteen months' worth of short

stories, written in the evenings while during the days

he wrote plays (which, by the way, have played to full

houses). It seems to me to be an astonishing

THE DEAD HAVE highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of

dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives,

bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their

thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of

the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty,

violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering

dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to

bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly

into view.

They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges

and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of

dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is

most likely to spill through into our world. The

traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of

the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers

that separate one reality from the next are worn thin

with the passage of innumerable feet.

Such an intersection on the highway of the dead

was located at Number 65, Tollington Place. Just a

brick-fronted, mock-Georgian detached house, Number 65

was

it warped the beams. It rattled the windows. It rattled

the mind too. Number 65, Tollington Place was a haunted

house, and no-one could possess it for long without

insanity setting in.

At some time in its history a horror had been

committed in that house. No-one knew when, or what. But

even to the untrained observer the oppressive

atmosphere of the house, particularly the top storey,

was unmistakable. There was a memory and a promise of

blood in the air of Number 65, a scent that lingered in

the sinuses, and turned the strongest stomach. The

building and its environs were shunned by vermin, by

birds, even by flies. No woodlice crawled in its

kitchen, no starling had nested in its attic. Whatever

violence had been done there, it had opened the house

up, as surely as a knife slits a fish's belly; and

through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead

peered out, and had their say.

That was the rumour anyway.

It was the third week of the investigation at 65,

Tollington Place. Three weeks of unprecedented success

in the realm of the paranormal. Using a newcomer to the

business, a twenty-year-old called Simon McNeal, as a

medium, the Essex University Parapsychology Unit had

seemed, whatever came into their heads. Their names, of

course, and their birth and death dates. Fragments of

memories, and well-wishes to their living descendants,

strange elliptical phrases that hinted at their present

torments and mourned their lost joys. Some of the hands

were square and ugly, some delicate and feminine. There

were obscene drawings and half-finished jokes alongside

lines of romantic poetry. A badly drawn rose. A game of

noughts and crosses. A shopping list.

The famous had come to this wailing wall -

Mussolini was there, Lennon and Janis Joplin - and

nobodies too, forgotten people, had signed themselves

beside the greats. It was a roll-call of the dead, and

it was growing day by day, as though word of mouth was

spreading amongst the lost tribes, and seducing them

out of silence to sign this barren room with their

sacred presence.

After a lifetime's work in the field of psychic

research, Doctor Florescu was well accustomed to the

hard facts of failure. It had been almost comfortable,

settling back into a certainty that the evidence would

never manifest itself. Now, faced with a sudden and

spectacular success, she felt both elated and confused.

Upstairs, the noises stopped.

Mary looked at her watch: it was six-seventeen p.m.

For some reason best known to the visitors, the

contact never lasted much after six. She'd wait 'til

half-past then go up. What would it have been today?

Who would have come to that sordid little room, and

left their mark?

'Shall I set up the cameras?' Reg Fuller, her

assistant, asked.

'Please,' she murmured, distracted by

expectation.

'Wonder what we'll get today?'

'We'll leave him ten minutes.'

'Sure.'

Upstairs, McNeal slumped in the corner of the

room, and watched the October sun through the tiny

window. He felt a little shut in, all alone in that

damn place, but he still smiled to himself, that warm,

beatific smile that melted even the most academic

heart. Especially Doctor Florescu's: oh yes, the woman

was infatuated with his smile, his eyes, the lost look

he put on for her.

It was a fine game.

wrote, ha, he laughed to think of it, the names he

found in telephone directories.

Yes, it was indeed a fine game.

She promised him so much, she tempted him with

fame, encouraging every lie that he invented. Promises

of wealth, of applauded appearances on the television,

of an adulation he'd never known before. As long as he

produced the ghosts.

He smiled the smile again. She called him her Go-

Between: an innocent carrier of messages. She'd be up

the stairs soon - her eyes on his body, his voice close

to tears with her pathetic excitement at another series

of scrawled names and nonsense.

He liked it when she looked at his nakedness, or

all but nakedness. All his sessions were carried out

with him only dressed in a pair of briefs, to preclude

any hidden aids. A ridiculous precaution. All he needed

were the leads under his tongue, and enough energy to

fling himself around for half an hour, bellowing his

head off.

He was sweating. The groove of his breast-bone

was slick with it, his hair plastered to his pale

forehead. Today had been hard work: he was looking

forward to getting out of the room, sluicing himself

How they buzzed, these harmless insect voices,

buzzed and sang and complained. How they complained.

Mary Florescu drummed the table with her fingers.

Her wedding ring was loose today, she felt it moving

with the rhythm of her tapping. Sometimes it was tight

and sometimes loose: one of those small mysteries that

she'd never analysed properly but simply accepted. In

fact today it was very loose: almost ready to fall off.

She thought of Alan's face. Alan's dear face. She

thought of it through a hole made of her wedding ring,

as if down a tunnel. Was that what his death had been

like: being carried away and yet further away down a

tunnel to the dark? She thrust

the ring deeper on to her hand. Through the tips of

her index-finger and thumb she seemed almost to taste

the sour metal as she touched it. It was a curious

sensation, an illusion of some kind.

To wash the bitterness away she thought of the

boy. His face came easily, so very easily, splashing

into her consciousness with his smile and his

unremarkable physique, still unmanly. Like a girl

really - the roundness of him, the sweet clarity of his

skin - the innocence.

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Clive Barker - Books of Blood Vol. 1

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