Weaveworld Read online

  CLIVE BARKER

  WEAVEWORLD

  HARPER

  Voyager

  To D.J.D

  ‘… the spirit has its

  homeland, which is the

  realm of the meaning

  of things.’

  Saint Exupéry

  The Wisdom of the Sands

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  BOOK ONE: IN THE KINGDOM OF THE CUCKOO

  Part One: Wild Blue Yonder

  I

  HOMING

  II

  THE PURSUERS

  III

  WHO MOVED THE GROUND?

  IV

  CONTACT

  V

  BEFORE THE DARK

  VI

  MAD MOONEY

  Part Two: Births, Deaths and Marriages

  I

  THE SUIT OF LIGHTS

  II

  THE SKIN OF THE TEETH

  III

  SELLING HEAVEN

  IV

  NUPTIALS

  V

  IN THE ARMS OF MAMA PUS

  VI

  SICK SOULS

  VII

  THE TALL-BOY

  VIII

  FOLLOWING THE THREAD

  IX

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  X

  THE MENSTRUUM

  Part Three: The Exiles

  I

  THE RIVER

  II

  WAKING IN THE DARK

  III

  WHAT SHE TOLD

  IV

  NIGHT TERRORS

  V

  FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

  VI

  EVENTS IN A HIGH WIND

  VII

  THE AFTERMATH

  VIII

  NECESSARY EVILS

  IX

  ON THE MIGHT OF PRINCES

  X

  HUMANKINDNESS

  XI

  THREE VIGNETTES

  Part Four: What Price Wonderland?

  I

  TO SELL IS TO OWN

  II

  TELL ME NO LIES

  III

  SO NEAR. SO FAR

  IV

  BREAKING THE LAW

  V

  THRESHOLD

  BOOK TWO: THE FUGUE

  Part Five: Revels

  I

  CAL, AMONGST MIRACLES

  II

  AT THE LAKE, AND LATER

  III

  DELUSIONS

  IV

  ALLEGIANCES

  V

  THE ORCHARD OF LEMUEL LO

  VI

  CAPRA’S HOUSE

  VII

  SHADWELL ON HIGH

  VIII

  THE VIRGIN BLOODED

  IX

  NEVER, AND AGAIN

  X

  THE SUMMONS

  XI

  AT THE GAZEBO

  XII

  A VANISHING BREED

  XIII

  A PROPOSAL

  Part Six: Back Among the Blind Men

  I

  TIME’S GONE BY

  II

  DESPAIR

  III

  FORGETFULNESS

  IV

  THE NOMADS

  V

  OUR LADY OF THE BONES

  VI

  THE BRITTLE MACHINE

  VII

  TALES OF SPOOK CITY

  Part Seven: The Demagogue

  I

  THE MESSENGER

  II

  SEEING THE LIGHT

  III

  CHARISMA

  IV

  AS GOOD MEN GO

  V

  THE HOURS PASS

  VI

  HELLO, STRANGER

  VII

  LOST CAUSES

  VIII

  NEW EYES FOR OLD

  IX

  A SECRET PLACE

  X

  FATALITIES

  XI

  CAL, TRAVELLING NORTH

  XII

  RESOLUTION

  Part Eight: The Return

  I

  STRATEGY

  II

  THE BURIAL PARTY

  III

  THE HORSE UNHARNESSED

  IV

  THE ROPE-DANCERS

  V

  NONESUCH

  VI

  THE FLESH IS WEAK

  VII

  AN OPEN BOOK

  VIII

  THE ESSENTIAL DRAGON

  IX

  THE FIRE

  X

  UNEARTHLY DELIGHTS

  XI

  A WITNESS

  XII

  ONE FELL SWOOP

  XIII

  A FLEETING GLIMPSE

  XIV

  THE NARROW BRIGHT

  Part Nine: Into the Gyre

  I

  TRESPASSERS

  II

  THE TEMPLE

  III

  THE MIRACLE OF THE LOOM

  IV

  SHADWELL

  V

  A FRAGILE PEACE

  BOOK THREE: OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER

  Part Ten: The Search for the Scourge

  I

  NO REST FOR THE WICKED

  II

  OBLIVION

  III

  THE WALL

  IV

  URIEL

  Part Eleven: The Dream Season

  I

  PORTRAIT OF THE HERO AS A YOUNG LUNATIC

  II

  REPRESENTATIONS

  III

  NO LULLABIES

  IV

  THE SHRINE OF THE MORTALITIES

  V

  THE NAKED FLAME

  VI

  DEATH COMES HOME

  Part Twelve: Stalking Paradise

  I

  A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

  II

  DUST AND ASHES

  III

  THE SECRET ISLE

  IV

  PAST HOPE

  Part Thirteen: Magic Night

  I

  BLIZZARD

  II

  SHELTER FROM THE STORM

  III

  ON THE HILL

  IV

  SYMMETRY

  V

  THE SLEEPWALKER

  VI

  RAPTURE

  About the Author

  Also By Clive Barker

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  I remember a window in a farmhouse in North Wales which had a sill of white-washed stone so deep I could sit sideways in it at the age of six, hugging my knees to my chin. From that spying place I had a view of the orchard of apple trees behind the house. The orchard seemed large to me at the time, though in retrospect it probably contained less than twenty trees. In the heat of the afternoon the farmyard cats, having exerted themselves mousing, went there to doze, and I went to hunt through the unkempt grass for eggs laid by nomadic hens. Beyond the orchard was a low wall with an ancient mossy stile. And beyond the wall an expanse of rolling meadow, grazed by sheep, with the sea a misty blue prospect.

  I have little way of knowing how accurate these memories are; almost forty years have passed since I was small enough to sit in that window niche. The photographs my parents took of those distant summers are still pasted in the musty pages of their album, but they are tiny, black and white and often blurred. There are, it’s true, a couple of pictures of the cats, dozing. But none of the orchard, or the wall, or the meadow. And none of the window where I sat.

  Perhaps it doesn’t really matter how accurate my memories are; all that matters is how powerfully they move me. I still conjure that place in my dreams, and when I wake I have the details clear in my head. The smell of the night-light
s my mother set on the dresser in my bedroom, the dapple beneath the trees, the warmth and weight of an egg, found in the grass and carried into the kitchen like unearthed treasure. The dreams are all the evidence I need. I was there once, blissfully happy. And though I cannot tell you how, I believe I will be there again.

  The farmhouse has long since disappeared; the cats are dead, the orchard uprooted. But I will be there again.

  If you are already familiar with the book in your hand, you know the relevance of this sliver of autobiography. Weaveworld is a meditation on memory. Yes, it also tells about magic and demagogery and angelic judgments, but the central drama of the tale is the way the characters remember – or fail to remember – the glimpse they’ve had of paradise. This, for instance, of Cal Mooney, our hero:

  ‘It was only when, in the middle of a dreamy day, something reminded him – a scent, a shout – that he had been in another place, and breathed its air and met its creatures, it was only then that he realized how tentative his recall was …

  … The glories of the Fugue were becoming mere words, the reality of which he could no longer conjure. When he thought of an orchard it was less and less that extraordinary place he’d slept in (slept, and dreamt that his life he was now living was the dream) and more a commonplace stand of apple trees …

  … Surely dying was like this, he thought; losing things dear and unable to prevent their passing.’

  The novel is not primarily about the escape into Eden. It’s about how the knowledge of Eden slips from us, and the means we devise to hold on to that knowledge. This is, I think, a universal experience, which may go some way to explaining why the book continues to find readers. I recently finished a six-week publicity tour for a new novel, and at book-signings across the country found readers bringing me battered but much-beloved copies of Weaveworld to be inscribed; several times I heard people say the book had helped them through dark times in their personal lives.

  There is nothing more gratifying to this author than to sign and personalize a book which has seen some action: passed between friends, dropped in the bath, coffee-stained and sun-yellowed. I have in my library copies of certain works – Melville, Poe, Blake – that I’ve treasured over the years, all much the worse for wear. I know how close you can get to a book whose stains and creases are part of your shared history. And what more perfect marriage of form and content, than that a novel about memory, like Weaveworld. should be valued because of the events that have marked it?

  The book was published in 1987, the year in which the first Hellraiser film was released, but it represented a considerable departure from the transgressive horror fiction with which I had become identified. There were plenty of critics ready to snipe at the change of direction, opining that my imagination was too dark for the genre I was attempting to infiltrate, and I was better off staying on the horror shelves. But the response from readers, including many who were devoted to the extremes of my earlier work, was overwhelmingly positive. The book sold solidly from the outset, and has continued to do so, in several languages, ever since. It has sparked off creative work in other media from readers who wanted to explore the story for themselves: paintings, poems, musical compositions; even an opera, planned for production in Paris. I have come to believe that the darkness I imported into the work, far from proving problematic, is very much to the book’s purpose. Yes, there are raptures in the novel, and glorious deliriums. But the Fugue – the magic haven of the book – is threatened with total destruction, and the powers that overshadow it are not tuppenny coloured terrors. They are the obscenities of human cruelty and human despair.

  Tales of Paradise Lost are central to our culture, of course; we are all exiles from some place of bliss.

  What is that place? A memory of a pre-conscious state of perfect contentment, where we believe ourselves whole because we have not yet comprehended the fact of our physical separation from our mothers? Or a religious conviction, too deep in our cells to be subjected to the rigours of intellectual enquiry, that knows our connection to the planet, to animal life, to the stars? A faith, is it? Or a glorious certainty?

  It isn’t necessary for a storyteller to have answers to the questions they pose, of course; only to be interested enough to ask them. Weaveworld is full of unrequited enquiries. Why does Immacolata’s hatred of the Seerkind burn so intensely? Is the creature in the Empty Quarter an angel or not? And if the garden of sand in which it has kept its psychotic vigil is not the Eden of Genesis, then where did the Seerkind arise from? There are certainly answers to these mysteries to be wrought and written, but they would, I am certain, only beg further questions, which if answered would beg yet more. For all its length and elaboration, the novel does not attempt to fill in every gap in its invented history. Nothing ever begins, its first line announces; there are inumerable stories from which this fragment of narrative springs, and there will be plenty to tell when it’s done. Though I have had requests aplenty for a sequel, I will never write one. The tale isn’t finished; but I’ve told all I can.

  That is not to say my attitude to the work does not continue to change. In the past ten years I’ve gone through periods when I was thoroughly out of sorts with the novel, even on occasion irritated that it found such favour with readers when other stories seemed more worthy. And in the troughs of my discomfort, I made what with hindsight seems to be dubious judgments about fantastic fiction as a whole. I have been, I think, altogether disparaging about the ‘escapist’ elements of the genre, emphasizing its powers to address social, moral and even philosophical issues at the expense of celebrating its dreamier virtues. I took this position out of a genuine desire to defend a fictional form I love from accusations of triviality and triteness, but my zeal led me astray. Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation. Though of late my writing has concerned itself more and more with detailing that wounded, disappointing reality, as a reader I have rediscovered the pleasures of unrepentant escapism: the short fiction of Lord Dunsany, early Yeats poems, the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Ernst Fuchs.

  The author who wrote Weaveworld has, however, disappeared. I’ve not lost faith with the enchantments of fantasy, but there is a kind of easy sweetness in this book that would not, at least presently, come readily from my pen. We go through seasons perhaps; and Weaveworld was written in a balmier time. Perhaps there’ll be another. But its tender inventions seem very remote from the man writing these words.

  Maybe that’s why, when I sat down to work this morning, I thought of that sill in North Wales, and the orchard and the wall and the meadow. They too are remote, yet – like the copy of Weaveworld that sits beside me on the desk – they are here with me still; part of my past, and yet present.

  That which is imagined need never be lost, runs the epigram in the book of faery-tales Mimi Laschenski leaves in her granddaughter’s keeping. The book will become a repository, before the story of Weaveworld is told; a place where vulnerable enchantments can take refuge. So inner and outer books, tales of Faerie and of Fugue, collapse into a single idea, the same precious idea that brings readers to bookstores with battered copies to be signed, and me, back to memories of a sill and an orchard to set before you. It’s such a simple idea, but it still seems to me miraculous: that in words we may preserve ideas and images precious to us. Not only preserve them, but pass them on. To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

  C.B.

  BOOK ONE

  IN THE KINGDOM

  OF

  THE CUCKOO

  Part One

  Wild Blue Yonder

  ‘I for one, know of no

  sweeter sight for a man’s

  eyes tha
n his own country … ’

  Homer

  The Odyssey

  I

  HOMING

  1

  othing ever begins.

  There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

  The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.