Barker, Clive - The Inhuman Condition

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THE

INHUMAN

CONDITION

Tales of Terror

Books of Blood, Volume IV

CLIVE BARKER

POSEIDON PRESS New York

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is

entirely coincidental

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form

Published by Poseidon Press

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Simon & Schuster Building Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

POSEIDON PRESS is a registered trademark

of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd.

under the title Books of Blood, Volume IV

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

- Barker, Clive, date. The inhuman condition.

Contents: The inhuman condition- The body politic-Revelations -Down, Satan-

The age of desire.

1. Horror tales, English. L Title. PR6052.A64751 5 1985 823'.0872'08

86-5086

ISBN: 0-671-62686-8

To Alec and Con

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to: Doug Bennett, who got me into Penton_ville-and out again-in the

same day and later furnished me with his insights on prisons and the prison

service; to Jim Burr, for his mind's eye tour of White Deer, Texas, and for

the New York adventures; to Ros Stanwell-_Smith, for her enthusiastic

detailing of plagues and how to start them; and to Barbara Boote, my tireless

editor, whose enthusiasm has proved the best possible spur to invention.

CONTENTS

The Inhuman Condition

The Body Politic

Revelations

Down, Satan!

The Age of Desire

THE INHUMAN CONDITION

ARE YOU the one then?" Red demanded, seizing hold of the derelict by the

shoulder of his squalid

gabardine.

"What one d'you mean?" the dirt-caked face replied. He was scanning the

quartet of young men who'd cornered him with rodent's eyes. The tunnel where

they'd found him relieving himself was far from hope of help. They all knew it

and so, it seemed, did he. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You've been showing yourself to children," Red said.

The man shook his head, a dribble of spittle running from his lip into the

matted bush of his beard. "I've done nothing," he insisted.

Brendan sauntered across to the man, heavy footsteps hollow in the tunnel.

"What's your name?" he inquired, with deceptive courtesy. Though he lacked

Red's height and commanding manner, the scar that inscribed Brendan's cheek

from temple to jaw line suggested he knew suffering, both in the giving and

the receiving. "Name," he demanded. "I'm not going to ask you again."

"Pope," the old man muttered. "Mr. Pope."

Brendan grinned. "Mr. Pope?" he said. "Well, we heard you've been exposing

that rancid little prick of yours to innocent children. What do you say to

that?"

"No," Pope replied, again shaking his head. "That's not true. I never done

nothing like that." When he frowned the filth on his face cracked like crazy

paving, a second skin of grime which Was the accrual of many months. Had it

not been for the fragrance of alcohol off him, which obscured the worst of his

bodily stench, it would have been nigh on impossible to stand within a yard of

him. The man was human refuse, a shame to his species.

"Why bother with him?" Karney said. "He stinks."

Red glanced over his shoulder to silence the interruption. At seventeen,

Karney was the youngest, and in the quartet's unspoken hierarchy scarcely

deserving of an opinion. Recognizing his error, he shut up, leaving Red to

return his attention to the vagrant. He pushed Pope back against the wall of

the tunnel. The old man expelled a cry as he struck the concrete; it echoed

back and forth. Karney, knowing from past experience how the scene would go

from here, moved away and studied a gilded cloud of gnats on the edge of the

tunnel. Though he enjoyed being with Red and the other two-the camaraderie,

the petty larceny, the drinking-this particular game had never been much to

his taste. He couldn't see the sport in finding some drunken wreck of a man

like Pope and beating what little sense was left in his deranged head out of

him. It made Karney feel dirty, and he wanted no part of it.

Red pulled Pope off the wall and spat a stream of abuse into the man's face,

then, when he failed to get an adequate response, threw him back against the

tunnel a second time, more forcibly than the first, following through by

taking the breathless man by both lapels and shaking him until he rattled.

Pope threw a panicky glance up and down the track. A railway had once run

along this route through Highgate and Finsbury Park. The track was long gone,

however, and the site was public parkland, popular with early morning joggers

and late-evening lovers Now, in the middle of a clammy afternoon, the track

was deserted in both directions.

"Hey," said Catso, "don't break his bottles."

"Right," said Brendan, "we should dig out the drink before we break his head."

At the mention of being robbed of his liquor Pope began

to struggle, but his thrashing only served to enrage his captor. Red was in a

dirty mood. The day, like most days this Indian summer, had been sticky and

dull. Only the dog-end of a wasted season to endure; nothing to do, and no

money to spend. Some entertainment had been called for, and it had fallen to

Red as lion, and Pope as Christian, to supply it.

"You'll get hurt if you struggle," Red advised the man, "we only want to see

what you've got in your pockets."

"None of your business," Pope retorted, and for a moment he spoke as a man who

had once been used to being obeyed. The outburst made Karney turn from the

gnats and gaze at Pope's emaciated face. Nameless degeneracies had drained it

of dignity or vigor, but something remained there, glimmering beneath the

dirt. What had the man been, Karney wondered? A banker perhaps? A judge, now

lost to the law forever?

Catso had now stepped into the fray to search Pope's clothes, while Red held

his prisoner against the tunnel wall by the throat. Pope fought off Catso's

unwelcome attentions as best he could, his arms flailing like windmills, his

eyes getting progressively wilder. Don't fight, Karney willed him, it'll be

worse for you if you do. But the old man seemed to be on the verge of panic.

He was letting out small grunts of protest that were more animal than human.

"Somebody hold his arms," Catso said, ducking beneath Pope's attack. Brendan

grabbed hold of Pope's wrists and wrenched the man's arms up above his head to

facilitate an easier search. Even now, with any hope of release dashed, Pope

continued to squirm. He managed to land a solid kick to Red's left shin, for

which he received a blow in return. Blood broke from his nose and ran down

into his mouth. There was more color where that came from, Karney knew. He'd

seen pictures aplenty of spilled people-bright, gleaming coils of guts; yellow

fat and purple lungs-all that brilliance was locked up in the gray sack of

Pope's body. Why such a thought should occur to him Karney wasn't certain. It

distressed him, and he tried to turn his attention back to the gnats, but Pope

demanded his attention, loosing a cry of anguish as Catso ripped open one of

his several waistcoats to get to the lower layers.

"Bastards!" Pope screeched, not seeming to care that his insults would

inevitably earn him further blows. "Take your shifting hands off me or I'll

have you dead. All of you I" Red's fist brought an end to the threats, and

blood came running after blood. Pope spat it back at his tormentor. "Don't

tempt me,"

Pope said, his voice dropping to a murmur. "I warn you...”

"You smell like a dead dog," Brendan said. "Is that what you are: a dead dog?"

Pope didn't grant him a reply. His eyes were on Catso, who was systematically

emptying the coat and waistcoat pockets and tossing a pathetic collection of

keepsakes into the dust on the tunnel floor.

"Karney," Red snapped, "look through the stuff, will you? See if there's

anything worth having."

Karney stared at the plastic trinkets and the soiled ribbons, at the tattered

sheets of paper (was the man a poet?) and the wine-bottle corks. "It's all

trash," he said.

"Look anyway," Red instructed. "Could be money wrapped in that stuff." Karney

made no move to comply. "Look, damn you.

Reluctantly, Karney went down on his haunches and proceeded to sift through

the mound of rubbish Catso was still depositing in the dirt. He could see at a

glance that there was nothing of value there, though perhaps some of the

items-the battered photographs, the all but indecipherable notes-might offer

some clue to the man Pope had been before drink and incipient lunacy had

driven the memories away. Curious as he was, Karney wished to respect Pope's

privacy. It was all the man had left.

"There's nothing here," he announced after a cursory examination. But Catso

hadn't finished his search. The deeper he dug the more layers of filthy

clothing presented themselves to his eager hands. Pope had more pockets than a

master magician.

Karney glanced up from the forlorn heap of belongings and found, to his

discomfort, that Pope's eyes were on him. The old man, exhausted and beaten,

had given up his protests. He looked pitiful. Karney opened his hands to

signify that he had taken nothing from the heap. Pope, by way of reply,

offered a tiny nod.

"Got it!" Catso yelled triumphantly. "Got the fucker!" and pulled a bottle of

vodka from one of the pockets. Pope was either too feeble to notice that his

alcohol supply had been snatched or too tired to care. Whichever way, he made

no sound of complaint as the liquor was stolen from him.

"Any more?" Brendan wanted to know. He'd begun to giggle, a high-pitched laugh

that signaled his escalating excitement. "Maybe the dog's got more where that

came from," he said, letting Pope's hands fall and pushing Catso aside. The

latter made no objection to the treatment. He had his bottle and was

satisfied. He smashed off the neck to avoid contamination and began to drink,

squatting in the dirt. Red relinquished his grip on Pope now that Brendan had

taken charge. He was clearly bored with the game. Brendan, on the other hand,

was just beginning to get a taste for it.

Red walked over to Karney and turned over the pile of Pope's belongings with

the toe of his boot.

"Fucking wash-out," he stated, without feeling.

"Yeah," Karney said, hoping that Red's disaffection would signal an end to the

old man's humiliation. But Red had thrown the bone to Brendan, and he knew

better than to try and snatch it back. Karney had seen Brendan's capacity for

violence before and he had no desire to watch the man at work again. Sighing,

he stood up and turned his back on Brendan's activities. The echoes off the

tunnel's wall were all too eloquent however, a mingling of punches and

breathless obscenities. On past evidence nothing would stop Brendan until his

fury was spent. Anyone foolish enough to interrupt him would find themselves

victims in their turn.

Red had sauntered across to the far side of the tunnel, lit a cigarette, and

was watching the punishment meted out with casual interest. Karney glanced

around at Catso. He had descended from squatting to sitting in the dirt, the

bottle of vodka between his outstretched legs. He was grinning to himself,

deaf to the drool of pleas falling from Pope's broken mouth.

Karney felt sick to his stomach. More to divert his attention from the beating

than out of genuine interest, he returned to the junk filched from Pope's

pockets and turned it over, picking up one of the photographs to examine. It

was of a child, though it was impossible to make any guess as to family

resemblance. Pope's face was now barely recognizable; one eye had already

begun to close as the bruise around it swelled. Karney tossed the photograph

back with the rest of the mementoes. As he did so he caught sight of a length

of knotted cord which he had previously passed over. He glanced back up at

Pope. The puffed eye was closed, the other seemed sightless. Satisfied that he

wasn't being watched, Karney pulled the string from where it lay, coiled like

a snake in its nest, among the trash. Knots fascinated him and always had.

Though he had never possessed skill with academic puzzles (mathematics was a

mystery to him; the intricacies of language the same) he had always had a

taste for more tangible riddles. Given a knot, a jigsaw or a railway

timetable, he was happily lost to himself for hours. The interest went back to

his childhood, which had been solitary. With neither father nor siblings to

engage his attention what better companion than a puzzle?

He turned the string over and over, examining the three knots set at inch

intervals in the middle of its length. They were large and asymmetrical and

seemed to serve no discernible purpose except, perhaps, to infatuate minds

like his own. How else to explain their cunning construction except that the

knot_ter had been at pains to create a problem that was well nigh insoluble?

He let his fingers play over the surfaces of the knots, instinctively seeking

some latitude, but they had been so brilliantly contrived that no needle,

however fine, could have been pushed between the intersected strands. The

challenge they presented was too appealing to ignore. Again he glanced up at

the old man. Brendan had apparently tired of his labors. As Karney looked on

he threw the old man against the tunnel wall and let the body sink to the

ground. Once there, he let it lie. An unmistakable sewer stench rose from it.

"That was good," Brendan pronounced like a man who had stepped from an

invigorating shower. The exercise had raised a sheen of sweat on his ruddy

features; he was smiling from ear to ear. "Give me some of that vodka, Catso."

"All gone," Catso slurred, upending the bottle. "Wasn't more than a throatful

in it."

"You're a lying shit," Brendan told him, still grinning.

"What if I am?" Catso replied, and tossed the empty bottle away. It smashed.

"Help me up," he requested of Brendan. The latter, his great good humor

intact, helped Catso to his feet. Red had already started to walk out of the

tunnel; the others followed.

"Hey Karney," Catso said over his shoulder, "you coming?"

"Sure."

"You want to kiss the dog better?" Brendan suggested. Catso was almost sick

with laughter at the remark. Karney made no answer. He stood up, his eyes

glued to the inert figure slumped on the tunnel floor, watching for a flicker

of consciousness. There was none that he could see. He glanced after the

others. All three had their backs to him as they made their way down the

track. Swiftly, Karney pocketed the knots. The theft took moments only. Once

the cord was safely out of sight he felt a surge of triumph which was out of

all proportion to the goods he'd gained. He was already anticipating the hours

of amusement the knots would furnish. Time when he could forget himself, and

his emptiness; forget the sterile summer and the loveless winter ahead; forget

too the old man lying in his own waste yards from where he stood.

"Karney!" Catso called.

Karney turned his back on Pope and began to walk away from the body and the

attendant litter of belongings. A few paces from the edge of the tunnel the

old man behind him began to mutter in his delirium. The words were

incomprehensible. But by some acoustic trick, the walls of the tunnel

multiplied the sound. Pope's voice was thrown back and forth and back again,

filling the tunnel with whispers.

It wasn't until much later that night, when he was sitting alone in his

bedroom with his mother weeping in her sleep next door, that Karney had the

opportunity to study the knots at leisure. He had said nothing to Red or the

others about his stealing the cord. The theft was so minor they would have

mocked him for mentioning it. And besides, the knots offered him a personal

challenge, one which he would face-and conceivably fail-in private.

After some debate with himself he elected the knot he would first attempt and

began to work at it. Almost immediately he lost all sense of time passing; the

problem engrossed him utterly. Hours of blissful frustration passed unnoticed

as he analyzed the tangle, looking for some clue as to a hidden system in the

knotting. He could find none. The configurations, if they had some rationale,

were beyond him. All he could hope to do was tackle the problem by trial and

error. Dawn was threatening to bring the world to light again when he finally

relinquished the cord to snatch a few hours

of sleep, and in a night's work he had merely managed to loosen a tiny

fraction of the knot.

Over the next four days the problem became an idee fixe, a hermetic obsession

to which he would return at any available opportunity, picking at the knot

with fingers that were increasingly numb with use. The puzzle enthralled him

as little in his adult life ever had. Working at the knot he was deaf and

blind to the outside world. Sitting in his lamp-lit room by night, or in the

park by day, he could almost feel himself drawn into its snarled heart, his

consciousness focused so minutely it could go where light could not. But

despite his persistence, the unraveling proved a slow business. Unlike most

knots he had encountered, which, once loosened in part, conceded the entire

solution, this structure was so adroitly designed that prising one element

loose only served to constrict and tighten another. The trick, he began to

grasp, was to work on all sides of the knot at an equal rate, loosening one

part a fraction then moving around to loosen another to an equal degree, and

so on. This systematic rotation, though tedious, gradually showed results.

He saw nothing of Red, Brendan or Catso in this time. Their silence suggested

that they mourned his absence as little as he mourned theirs. He was

surprised, therefore, when Catso turned up looking for him on Friday evening.

He had come with a proposal. He and Brendan had found a house ripe for robbery

and wanted Karney as lookout man. He had fulfilled that role twice in the

past. Both had been small breaking and entering jobs like this, which on the

first occasion had netted a number of salable items of jewelry, and on the

second several hundred pounds in cash. This time, however, the job was to be

done without Red's involvement. He was increasingly taken up with Anelisa, and

she, according to Catso, had made him swear off petty theft and save his

talents for something more ambitious. Karney sensed that Catso-and Brendan

too, most likely-was itching to prove his criminal proficiency without Red.

The house they had chosen was an easy target, so Catso claimed, and Karney

would be a damn fool to let a chance of such easy pickings pass by. He nodded

along with Catso's enthusiasm, his mind on other pickings. When Catso finally

finished his spiel Karney agreed to the job, not for the money, but because

saying yes would get him back to the knot soonest.

MUCH later that evening, at Catso's suggestion, they met to look at the site

of the proposed job. The location certainly suggested an easy take. Karney had

often walked over the bridge that carried Hornsey Lane across the Archway

Road, but he had never noticed the steep footpath-part steps, part track-that

ran from the side of the bridge down to the road below. Its entrance was

narrow and easily overlooked, and its meandering length was lit by only one

lamp, which light was obscured by trees growing in the gardens that backed on

to the pathway. It was these gardens-their back fences easily scaled or

wrenched down-that offered such perfect access to the houses. A thief, using

the secluded footpath, might come and go with impunity, unseen by travelers on

either the road above or that below. All the setup required was a lookout on

the pathway to warn of the occasional pedestrian who might use the footpath.

This would be Karney's duty.

The following night was a thief's joy. Cool, but not cold; cloudy, but without

rain. They met on Highgate Hill, at the gates of the Church of the Passionist

Fathers, and from there made their way down to the Archway Road. Approaching

the pathway from the top end would, Brendan had argued, attract more

attention. Police patrols were more common on Hornsey Lane, in part because

the bridge was irresistible to local depressives. For the committed suicide

the venue had distinct advantages, its chief appeal being that if the eighty-

foot drop didn't kill you the juggernauts hurtling south on the Archway Road

certainly would.

Brendan was on another high tonight, pleased to be leading the others instead

of taking second place to Red. His talk was an excitable babble, mostly about

women. Karney let Catso have pride of place beside Brendan and hung back a few

paces, his hand in his jacket pocket, where the knots were waiting. In the

last few hours, fatigued by so many sleepless nights, the cord had begun to

play tricks on Karney's eyes. On occasion it had even seemed to move in his

hand, as though it were working itself loose from the inside. Even now, as

they approached the pathway, he could seem to feel it shift against his palm.

"Hey man... look at that." Catso was pointing up the pathway; its full length

was in darkness. "Someone killed the lamp."

"Keep your voice down," Brendan told him and led the way up the path. It was

not in total darkness. A vestige of illumination was thrown up from the

Archway Road. But filtered as it was through a dense mass of shrubbery, the

path was still virtually benighted. Karney could scarcely see his hands in

front of his face. But the darkness would presumably dissuade all but the most

sure-footed of pedestrians from using the path. When they climbed a little

more than halfway up, Brendan brought the tiny party to a halt.

"This is the house," he announced.

"Are you sure?" Catso said.

"I counted the gardens. This is the one."

The fence that bounded the bottom of the garden was in an advanced state of

disrepair. It took only a brief manhandling from Brendan-the sound masked by

the roar of a late-night juggernaut on the tarmac below-to afford them easy

access. Brendan pushed through the thicket of brambles growing wild at the end

of the garden and Catso followed, cursing as he was scratched. Brendan

silenced him with a second curse, then turned back to Karney.

"We're going in. We'll whistle twice when we're out of the house. You remember

the signals?"

"He's not an imbecile. Are you Karney? He'll be all right. Now are we going or

not?" Brendan said no more. The two figures navigated the brambles and made

their way up into the garden proper. Once on the lawn, and out of the shadows

of the trees, they were visible as gray shapes against the house. Karney

watched them advance to the back door, heard a noise from the back door as

Catso-much the more nimble-fingered of the two-forced the lock. Then the duo

slid into the interior of the house. He was alone.

Not quite alone. He still had his companions on the cord. He checked up and

down the pathway, his eyes gradually becoming sharper in the sodium-tinted

gloom. There were no pedestrians. Satisfied, he pulled the knots from his

pockets. His hands were ghosts in front of him; he could hardly see the knots

at all. But, almost without his conscious intention guiding them, his fingers

began to take up their investigation afresh, and odd though it seemed, he made

more impression on the problem in a few seconds of blind manipulation than he

had in many of the hours preceding. Robbed of his eyes he went purely on

instinct, and it worked wonders. Again he had the bewildering sensation of

intentionality in the knot, as if more and more it was an agent in its own

undoing. Encouraged by the tang of victory, his fingers slid over the knot

with inspired accuracy, seeming to alight upon precisely the right threads to

manipulate.

He glanced again along the pathway to be certain it was still empty, then

looked back toward the house. The door remained open. There was no sign of

either Catso or Brendan, however. He returned his attention to the problem in

hand. He almost wanted to laugh at the ease with which the knot was suddenly

slipping undone.

His eyes, sparked by his mounting excitement perhaps, had begun to play a

startling trick. Flashes of color-rare, unnamable tints-were igniting in front

of him, their origins the heart of the knot. The light caught his fingers as

they worked. By it, his flesh became translucent. He could see his nerve

endings, bright with newfound sensibility; the rods of his finger bones

visible to the marrow Then, almost as suddenly as they flickered into being,

the colors would die, leaving his eyes bewitched in darkness until once more

they ignited.

His heart began to hammer in his ears. The knot, he sensed, was mere seconds

from solution. The interwoven threads were positively springing apart. His

fingers were the cord's playthings now, not the other way about. He opened

loops to feed the other two knots through. He pulled, he pushed; all at the

cord's behest.

And now colors came again, but this time his fingers were invisible, and

instead he could see something glowing in the last few hitches of the knot.

The form writhed like a fish in a net, growing bigger with every stitch he

cast off. The hammer in his head doubled in tempo. The air around him had

become almost glutinous, as if he were immersed in mud.

Someone whistled. He knew the signal should have carried some significance for

him, but he couldn't recall what. There were too many distractions: the

thickening air, his pounding head, the knot untying itself in his helpless

hand while the figure at its center-sinuous, glittering-raged and swelled.

The whistle came again. This time its urgency shook him from his trance. He

looked up. Brendan was already crossing the garden, with Catso trailing a few

yards behind. Karney had a moment only to register their appearance before the

knot initiated the final phase of its resolution. The last weave fell free,

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THEINHUMANCONDITIONTalesofTerrorBooksofBlood,VolumeIVCLIVEBARKERPOSEIDONPRESSNewYorkThesestoriesareworksoffiction.Names,characters,placesandincidentsareeithertheproductoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiouslyAnyresemblancetoactualeventsorlocalesorpersons,livingordead,isentirelycoincidentalCopyr...

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Barker, Clive - The Inhuman Condition

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