Everville Read online

  Memory, prophecy and fantasy—

  the past, the future and

  the dreaming moment between—

  are all in one country,

  living one immortal day.

  To know that is Wisdom.

  To use it is the Art.

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  WAS, IS, AND WILL BE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CONGREGATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART THREE

  VESSELS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART FOUR

  THE DEVIL AND D’AMOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  PART FIVE

  PARADE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART SIX

  THE GRAND DESIGN

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART SEVEN

  LEAVES ON THE STORY TREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  About the Author

  Also by

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Everville is the middle book of what is projected to be a trilogy called the Books of the Art. Mindful of the problems presented by “middle books”—that they often feel as though they exist in a kind of no-man’s land between the pleasures of the beginning and the dramas of the final act—I decided to break as many rules as I could in its construction. It begins, for instance, earlier than the first book of the trilogy (and I have a notion, though I’m not certain of this, that the third book may begin earlier still) and it travels much further than The Great and Secret Show, advancing and even contradicting the metaphysics of that book.

  I’ve said elsewhere that however fantastical my fiction may appear superficially, it is always rooted in some urgent personal need—a desire, if you will, to explain something to myself. Everville was written in America, the first of my large novels written on my adopted soil. The pioneers’ story that opens it comes out of some general reading I was doing about the way this country was settled, and the more I researched, the more fascinated I became with the drama of how these people redefined their lives. I was, if you will, doing some defining of my own; I sympathized. In fact the story of Maeve, the survivor of a failed journey to the West, is the most critical arc of the book, though the full weight of her significance does not become apparent until the book is almost at an end. Maeve the empire-builder, the founder of Everville, whose life history has been erased from the accounts of the very city she founded, is for me a very powerful figure. She begins as a child, confronting monsters. Her often tragic history then is traced through the book in a series of minor revelations that take us, as they escalate, across the boundary between this world and the other, the world of Quiddity.

  I won’t repeat here the observations I offer in the introduction to The Great and Secret Show concerning the origins of Quiddity. Rather let me explore a little of how the concept develops in this book. In Show the dream-sea is viewed through a door that stands a little ajar. There’s one brief scene in the dream-sea toward the end of the novel, but it offers little more than a teasing peep at the other world. In Everville (both city and book), that door swings open wide, and we are pulled through it, to begin a more detailed acquaintance with the place. The nature of the book changes once we become voyagers. If the tropes of what is dubbed “horror fiction” (the glimpsed otherness; the remote, unspeakable evil) are used as the underpinnings of The Great and Secret Show, then it is the elements of “fantasy”—in its most conventional definitions—that are offered in Everville: the voyage to distant islands, the exploration of a great, strange city (here, b’Kether Sabbat), the fabulous life-forms. But the nature of Quiddity (and the half-revealed secrets of its origins) provide me with the opportunity for some interesting riffs. The third city of the book (the first is Everville, the second is b’Kether Sabbat) is in fact made up of remembered fragments from a city I know very well: Liverpool. And the rememberer? Maeve, of course. She is the author, as it were, of Everville and this fantasized Liverpool; dreaming both into being, after her fashion.

  Dreams, of course, lie at the heart of the Books of the Art: the stories are configured around the idea of how something is made and imagined. This subject—creation—is arguably my chief theme as a writer, or, if you will, one end of my thematic spectrum—the other being destruction. In fact the book may be viewed as a kind of parade of “subcreations” which slowly reveal their connectedness to one another: the parade that winds through Everville toward disaster; the “Reef” which Grillo creates to synthesize all the information he’s assembled on the mysteries of the Art; the paintings of Ted Dusseldorf, which are Ted’s attempt to render the real world in metaphysical terms; Maeve’s dreamed cities; the obscene creation of the Lix. And among these larger creations, there are frequent references to smaller creations. Owen Buddenbaum, for instance, delights in the number of fictional works in which he has appeared. Later, talking to a bartender in town, he extols the talents of tale-telling. Even an inscription on a gravestone, though scarcely more than doggerel, carries uncanny force.

  The idea of the subcreation leads me to think of one of my most powerful influences: Arabian Nights. That collection of diverse tales may seem very remote from the novel you have in your hand, but there are few books on my shelves that have had such a thorough-going effect on my work. There is a wonderful casualness about the inventions in the Nights, a delicious indifference to the niceties of reality that also, of course, informs fairy tales and folklore. Nobody in these stories wastes much breath expressing surprise or disbelief in the face of the wonders and horrors that touch their lives. They are simply part of experience, like love, like death.

  In my mind’s eye I picture my audience responding to the stories I tell with the kind of robust acceptance of possibilities that I imagine those who listened to the original tales of Arabian Nights, or watched Shakespeare’s plays, possessed. Nobody said, during the first act of Hamlet, “Oh, this doesn’t work for me. I don’t believe in ghosts.” Nobody—I suspect—learning Sinbad’s story, remarked that giant rocs are merely legends. You may argue that these audiences were ill-informed, that because they did believe in phantoms and giant birds they were unsoph
isticated. I beg to differ. I think there was a health and a vitality in their embracing of ideas and conventions which has largely been “sophisticated” out of us.

  So, here in Everville, you will find some of the lessons of Arabian Nights applied. I assume my readers have the kind of elastic minds that don’t need mollycoddling with a lot of fake theorizing. They know what this is all about. It’s a book designed to stretch the imagination—a labyrinth of stories, some of which will end in tragedy, some in reunion and love. Elements of the outlandish and the fantastic will come and go, their unlikeliness often unremarked. And by degrees, by increments, a vision of the world will show itself. It’s not a moral vision, I think; nor is it immoral. Its author has little or no interest in that dimension of things. (Good and evil were at the heart of The Great and Secret Show; they’re much less significant here.) This is a book about the threads between things, about how the past influences the present, how our private desires shape our public faces, about the intricate cross-knitting of believer and divinity.

  In the middle of the book is a symbol, which is a representation of this connectedness. It is a kind of map representing the crossroads between this world, called the Cosm, and the other world, the world of Quiddity, called the Metacosm. The passage from one to another is symbolically represented along the horizontal axis. The vertical axis, north of that central bar, represents the ascent of mind into the oneness of the divine state, and its descent, south of the central bar, to the primal simplicity of a single cell. It’s a kind of compass, if you like, by which the readers may chart their position. But it’s also my reworking of the crucifix, for at the center of the device—at the intersection of the physical journey and the spiritual—is the spread-eagled figure of a human being. The image is a kind of goad to me. My ambition for this trilogy—which will be completed when I write the Third Book of the Art—is clear whenever I look at the image: I want to put my readers, for a time, into that sacred spot; to make them feel the flow of energies between states of being.

  —Clive Barker

  August 13, 1999

  PART ONE

  WAS, IS, AND WILL BE

  ONE

  I

  It was hope undid them. Hope, and the certainty that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They’d lost so much already along the trail—children, healers, leaders, all taken—surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

  When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared—clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind—they had said to each other: This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it’s only the first week of October. Maybe we’ll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we’ll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows.

  On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

  Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, though they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as any black midnight.

  Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.

  Hope was small now; and smaller by the day. Of the eighty-three optimistic souls who had departed Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848 (this sum swelled by six births along the way), thirty-one remained alive. During the first three months of the journey, through Kansas, into Nebraska, then across 487 miles of Wyoming, there had been only six fatalities. Three lost in a drowning accident; two wandered off and believed killed by Indians; one hanged by her own hand from a tree. But with the heat of summer, sicknesses abounded, and the trials of the journey began to take their toll. The very young and the very old had perished first, sickened by bad water or bad meat. Men and women who had been in the prime of their lives five or six months before, hardy, brave, and ripe, became withered and wretched as the food stocks dwindled, and the land, which they had been told would supply them with all manner of game and fruit, failed to provide the promised bounty. Men would leave the wagon train for days at a time in search of food, only to return hollow-eyed and empty-handed. It was therefore in an already much weakened state that the travelers faced the cold, and its effect had proved calamitous. Forty-seven individuals had perished in the space of three weeks, dispatched by frost, snow, exhaustion, starvation, and hopelessness.

  It had fallen to Herman Deale, who was the closest the survivors had to a physician since the death of Doc Hodder, to keep an account of these deaths. When they reached Oregon, the glad land in the West, he had told the survivors they would together pray for the departed, and pay due respects to each and every soul whose passing he had set down in his journal. Until that happy time, the living were not to concern themselves overmuch with the dead. They had gone into the warmth and comfort of God’s Bosom and would not blame those who buried them for the shallowness of their graves, or the brevity of the prayers said over them.

  “We will speak of them lovingly,” Deale had declared, “when we have a little breath to spare.”

  The day after making this promise to the deceased, he had joined their number, his body giving out as they ploughed through a snowfield. His corpse remained unburied, at least by human hand. The snow was coming down so thickly that by the time his few provisions had been divided up among the remaining travelers, his body had disappeared from sight.

  That night, Evan Babcock and his wife, Alice, both perished in their sleep, and Mary Willcocks, who had outlived all five of her children, and seen her husband wither and die from grief, succumbed with a sob that was still ringing off the mountain-face after the tired heart that had issued it was stilled.

  Daylight came, but it brought no solace. The snowfall was as heavy as ever. Nor was there now a single crack in the clouds to show the pioneers what lay ahead. They went with heads bowed, too weary to speak, much less sing, as they had sung in the blithe months of May and June, raising hosannas to the heavens for the glory of this adventure.

  A few of them prayed in silence, asking God for the strength to survive. And some, perhaps, made promises in their prayers, that if they were granted that strength, and came through this white wilderness to a green place, their gratitude would be unbounded, and they would testify to the end of their lives that for all the sorrows of this life, no man should turn from God, for God was hope, and Everlasting.

  * * *

  II

  At the beginning of the journey west there had been a total of thirty-two children in the caravan. Now there was only one. Her name was Maeve O’Connell; a plain twelve-year-old whose thin body belied a fortitude which would have astonished those who’d shaken their heads in the spring and told her widowed father she would never survive the journey. She was stick and bones, they’d said, weak in the legs, weak in the belly. Weak in the head too, most likely, they whispered behind their hands, just like her father Harmon, who while the parties had been assembling in Missouri, had talked most elaborately of his ambitions for the West. Oregon might well be Eden, he’d said, but it was not the forests and the mountains that would distinguish it as a place of human triumph: It was the glorious, shining city that he intended to build there.

  Idiotic talk, it was privately opined, especially from an
Irishman who’d seen only Dublin and the backstreets of Liverpool and Boston. What could he know of towers and palaces?

  Once the journey was underway, those who scorned Harmon among themselves became a good deal less discreet, and he soon learned to keep talk of his ambitions as a founder of cities between himself and his daughter. His fellow travelers had more modest hopes for the land that lay ahead. A stand of timber from which to build a cabin; good earth; sweet water. They were suspicious of anyone with a grander vision.

  Not that the modesty of their requirements had subsequently spared them from death. Many of the men and women who’d been most voluble in their contempt for Harmon were dead now, buried far from good earth or sweet water, while the crazy man and his stick and bones daughter lived on. Sometimes, even in these last desperate days, Maeve and Harmon would whisper as they walked together beside their skeletal nag. And if the wind shifted for a moment it would carry their words away to the ears of those nearby. Exhausted though they were, father and daughter were still talking of the city they would build when this travail was over and done; a wonder that would live long after every cabin in Oregon had rotted, and the memories of those who’d built them gone to dust.

  They even had a name for this time-defying metropolis.

  It would be called Everville.

  Ah, Everville!

  How many nights had Maeve listened to her father talk of the place, his eyes on the crackling fire, but his gaze on another sight entirely: the streets, the squares, and the noble houses of that miracle to be.

  “Sometimes it’s like you’ve already been there,” Maeve had remarked to him one evening in late May.

  “Oh but I have, my sweet girl,” he had said, staring across the open land towards the last of the sun. He was a shabby, pinched man, even in those months of plenty, but the breadth of his vision made up for the narrowness of his brow and lips. She loved him without qualification, as her mother had before her, and never more than when he spoke of Everville.