Books of Blood: Volume Three

  From the back cover

  EVEN DEATH HAS ITS GRACE

  To a mortician, the preparation of a corpse is an art. The smooth, silent exchange of blood and embalming fluid is like a symphony to be orchestrated. The presentation of the deceased—lying in a shining casket framed by flowers—is an exquisitely composed tableau. And the burial itself is the magnificent climax to his craftsmanship.

  Clive Barker also knows how to prepare a body for the grave.

  He knows how to plunge his readers into unearthly depths, spiraling from dark horror to dizzying madness. He knows how to lower the body temperature to an icy chill—and make the heart pound faster and faster.

  Until it stops...

  CLIVE BARKER

  “He’s an original... what he’s doing is important and exciting.”

  —Stephen King

  “The first true voice of the next generation of horror writers.”

  —Ramsey Campbell

  “Barker’s work possesses a visual flair unusual in any fiction, let alone the horror genre.”

  —Books and Bookmen

  “Barker’s visions are at one turn horrifyingly stomach-wrenching and at the next flickering with brilliant invention that leaves the reader shaking ...”

  —Sounds

  “The best new horror writer in years!”

  —Michael Moorcock

  “Potentially, Barker is a better writer than Stephen King and Peter Straub ... an immensely talented writer!”.

  —Fantasy Review

  “Barker is in a class by himself.”

  —Locus

  “A great new talent!”

  —James Herbert

  “Clive Barker will scare the pants off you.”

  —Fangoria

  Berkley Books by Clive Barker

  CLIVE BARKER’S BOOKS OF BLOOD VOLUME I

  CLIVE BARKER’S BOOKS OF BLOOD VOLUME II

  CLIVE BARKER’S BOOKS OF BLOOD VOLUME III

  This Berkley book contains the complete

  text of the original edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading and was printed from new film.

  CLIVE BARKER’S BOOKS OF BLOOD VOLUME THREE

  A Berkley Book/published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd. 1984 Berkley edition/October 1986

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1984 by Clive Barker. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

  ISBN: 0-425-09347-6

  A BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. The name “BERKLEY” and the stylized “B” with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  To Roy and Lynne

  Every body is a book of blood;

  Wherever we’re opened, we’re red.

  CONTENTS

  SON OF CELLULOID

  RAWHEAD REX

  CONFESSIONS OF A (PORNOGRAPHER’S) SHROUD

  SCAPE-GOATS

  HUMAN REMAINS

  SON OF CELLULOID

  ONE: TRAILER

  Barberio felt fine, despite the bullet. Sure, there was a catch in his chest if he breathed too hard, and the wound in his thigh wasn’t too pretty to look at, but he’d been holed before and come up smiling. At least he was free: that was the main thing. Nobody, he swore, nobody would ever lock him up again, he’d kill himself rather than be taken back into custody. If he was unlucky and they cornered him, he’d stick the gun in his mouth and blow off the top of his head. No way would they drag him back to that cell alive.

  Life was too long if you were locked away and counting it in seconds. It had only taken him a couple of months to learn that lesson. Life was long, and repetitive and debilitating, and if you weren’t careful you were soon thinking it would be better to die than go on existing in the shit-hole they’d put you in. Better to string yourself up by your belt in the middle of the night rather than face the tedium of another twenty-four hours, all eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds of it.

  So he went for broke.

  First he bought a gun on the prison black market. It cost him everything he had and a handful of IOUs he’d have to make good on the outside if he wanted to stay alive. Then he made the most obvious move in the book: he climbed the wall. And whatever god looked after the liquor-store muggers of this world was looking after him that night, because hot damn if he didn’t scoot right over that wall and away without so much as a dog sniffing at his heels.

  And the cops? Why they screwed it up every which way from Sunday, looking for him where he’d never gone, pulling in his brother and his sister-in-law on suspicion of harbouring him when they didn’t even know he’d escaped, putting out an All-Points Bulletin with a description of his pre-prison self, twenty pounds heavier than he was now. All this he’d heard from Geraldine, a lady he’d courted in the good old days, who’d given him a dressing for his leg and the bottle of Southern Comfort that was now almost empty in his pocket. He’d taken the booze and sympathy and gone on his way, trusting to the legendary idiocy of the law and the god who’d got him so far already.

  Sing-Sing he called this god. Pictured him as a fat guy with a grin that hooked from one ear to the other, a prime salami in one hand, and a cup of dark coffee in the other. In Barberio’s mind Sing-Sing smelt like a full belly at Mama’s house, back in the days when Mama was still well in the head, and he’d been her pride and joy.

  Unfortunately Sing-Sing had been looking the other way when the one eagle-eye cop in the whole city saw Barberio draining his snake in a back alley, and recognized him from that obsolete APB. Young cop, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, out to be a hero. He was too dumb to learn the lesson of Barberio’s warning shot. Instead of taking cover, and letting Barberio make a break, he’d forced the issue by coming straight down the alley at him.

  Barberio had no choice. He fired.

  The cop fired back. Sing-Sing must have stepped in there somewhere, spoiling the cop’s aim so that the bullet that should have found Barberio’s heart hit his leg, and guiding the returning shot straight into the cop’s nose. Eagle-eye went down as if he’d just remembered an appointment with the ground, and Barberio was away, cursing, bleeding and scared. He’d never shot a man before, and he’d started with a cop. Quite an introduction to the craft.

  Sing-Sing was still with him though. The bullet in his leg ached, but Geraldine’s ministrations had stopped the blood, the liquor had done wonders for the pain, and here he was half a day later, tired but alive, having hopped half-way across a city so thick with vengeful cops it was like a psycho’s parade at the Policemen’s Ball. Now all he asked of his protector was a place to rest up awhile. Not for long, just enough time to catch his breath and plan his future movements. An hour or two of shut-eye wouldn’t go amiss either.

  Thing was, he’d got that belly-ache, the deep, gnawing pain he got more and more these days. Maybe he’d find a phone, when he’d rested for a time, and call Geraldine again, get her to sweet-talk a doctor into seeing him. He’d been planning to get out of the city before midnight, but that didn’t look like a plausible option now. Dangerous as it was, he would have to stay in the locality a night and maybe the best part of the next day; make his break for the open country when he’d recouped a little energy and had the bullet taken out of his leg.

  Jeez, but that belly griped. His guess was it was an ulcer, brought on by the filthy slop they called food at the peni
tentiary. Lots of guys had belly and shit-chute problems in there. He’d be better after a few days of pizzas and beers, he was damn sure of that.

  The word cancer wasn’t in Barberio’s vocabulary. He never thought about terminal disease, especially in reference to himself. That’d be like a piece of slaughterhouse beef fretting about an ingrowing hoof as it stepped up to meet the gun. A man in his trade, surrounded by lethal tools, doesn’t expect to perish from a malignancy in his belly. But that’s what that ache was.

  The lot at the back of the Movie Palace cinema had been a restaurant, but a fire had gutted it three years back, and the ground had never been cleared.

  It wasn’t a good spec for rebuilding, and no one had shown much interest in the site. The neighborhood had once been buzzing, but that was in the sixties, early seventies. For a heady decade places of entertainment—restaurants, bars, cinemas—had flourished. Then came the inevitable slump. Fewer and fewer kids came this way to spend their money: there were new spots to hit, new places to be seen in. The bars closed up, the restaurants followed. Only the Movie Palace remained as a token reminder of more innocent days in a district that was becoming tackier and more dangerous every year.

  The jungle of convolvulus and rotted timbers that throttled the vacant lot suited Barberio just fine. His leg was giving him jip, he was stumbling from sheer fatigue, and the pain in his belly was worsening. A spot to lay down his clammy head was needed, and damn quick. Finish off the Southern Comfort, and think about Geraldine.

  It was one thirty a.m.; the lot was a trysting ground for cats. They ran, startled, through the man-high weeds as he pushed aside some of the fencing timbers and slid into the shadows. The refuge stank of piss, human and cat, of garbage, of old fires, but it felt like a sanctuary.

  Seeking the support of the back wall of the Movie Palace, Barberio leaned on his forearm and threw up a bellyful of Southern Comfort and acid. Along the wall a little way some kids had built a makeshift den of girders, fire-blackened planks and corrugated iron. Ideal, he thought, a sanctuary within a sanctuary. Sing-Sing was smiling at him, all greasy chops. Groaning a little (the belly was really bad tonight) he staggered along the wall to the lean-to den, and ducked through the door.

  Somebody else had used this place to sleep in: he could feel damp sacking under his hand as he sat down, and a bottle clinked against a brick somewhere to his left. There was a smell close by he didn’t want to think too much about, like the sewers were backing up. All in all, it was squalid: but it was safer than the street. He sat with his back against the wall of the Movie Palace and exhaled his fears in a long, slow breath.

  No more than a block away, perhaps half a block, the babe-in-the-night wail of a cop car began, and his newly acquired sense of security sank without trace. They were closing in for the kill, he knew it. They’d just been playing him along, letting him think he was away, all the time cruising him like sharks, sleek and silent, until he was too tired to put up any resistance. Jeez: he’d killed a cop, what they wouldn’t do to him once they had him alone. They’d crucify him.

  O.K. Sing-Sing, what now? Take that surprised look off your face, and get me out of this.

  For a moment, nothing. Then the god smiled in his mind’s eye, and quite coincidentally he felt the hinges pressing into his back.

  Shit! A door. He was leaning against a door.

  Grunting with pain he turned and ran his fingers around this escape hatch at his back. To judge by touch it was a small ventilation grille no more than three feet square. Maybe it let on to a crawlspace or maybe into someone’s kitchen—what the hell? It was safer inside than out: that was the first lesson any newborn kid got slapped into him.

  The siren song wailed on, making Barberio’s skin creep. Foul sound. It quickened his heart hearing it.

  His thick fingers fumbled down the side of the grille feeling for a lock of some kind, and sure as shit there was a padlock, as gritty with rust as the rest of the metalwork.

  Come on Sing-Sing, he prayed, one more break is all I’m asking, let me in, and I swear I’m yours forever.

  He pulled at the lock, but damn it, it wasn’t about to give so easily. Either it was stronger than it felt, or he was weaker. Maybe a little of both.

  The car was slinking closer with every second. The wail drowned out the sound of his own panicking breath.

  He pulled the gun, the cop killer, out of his jacket pocket and pressed it into service as a snub-nosed crowbar. He couldn’t get much leverage on the thing, it was too short, but a couple of cursing heaves did the trick. The lock gave, a shower of rust scales peppered his face. He only just silenced a whoop of triumph.

  Now to open the grille, to get out of this wretched world into the dark.

  He insinuated his fingers through the lattice and pulled. Pain, a continuum of pain that ran from his belly to his bowel to his leg, made his head spin. Open, damn you, he said to the grille, open sesame.

  The door conceded.

  It opened suddenly, and he fell back on to the sodden sacking. A moment and he was up again, peering into the darkness within this darkness that was the interior of the Movie Palace.

  Let the cop car come, he thought buoyantly, I’ve got my hidey hole to keep me warm. And warm it was: almost hot in fact. The air out of the hole smelt like it had been simmering in there for a good long while.

  His leg had gone into a cramp and it hurt like fuck as he dragged himself through the door and into the solid black beyond. Even as he did so the siren turned a corner nearby and the baby wail died. Wasn’t that the patter of lawlike feet he could hear on the sidewalk?

  He turned clumsily in the blackness, his leg a dead-weight, his foot feeling about the size of a watermelon, and pulled the grille door to after him. The satisfaction was that of pulling up a drawbridge and leaving the enemy on the other side of the moat, somehow it didn’t matter that they could open the door just as easily as he had, and follow him in. Childlike, he felt sure nobody could possibly find him here. As long as he couldn’t see his pursuers, his pursuers couldn’t see him.

  If the cops did indeed duck into the lot to look for him, he didn’t hear them. Maybe he’d been mistaken, maybe they were after some other poor punk on the street, and not him. Well O.K., whatever. He had found himself a nice niche to rest up awhile, and that was fine and dandy.

  Funny, the air wasn’t so bad in here after all. It wasn’t the stagnant air of a crawlspace or an attic, the atmosphere in the hidey hole was alive. Not fresh air, no it wasn’t that, it smelt old and trapped sure enough, but it was buzzing nevertheless. It fairly sang in his ears, it made his skin tingle like a cold shower, it wormed its way up his nose and put the weirdest things in his head. It was like being high on something: he felt that good. His leg didn’t hurt anymore, or if it did he was too distracted by the pictures in his head. He was filling up to overflowing with pictures: dancing girls and kissing couples, farewells at stations, old dark houses, comedians, cowboys, undersea adventures—scenes he’d never lived in a million years, but that moved him now like raw experience, true and incontestable. He wanted to cry at the farewells, except that he wanted to laugh at the comedians, except that the girls needed ogling, the cowboys needed hollering for.

  What kind of place was this anyhow? He peered through the glamour of the pictures which were damn close to getting the better of his eyes. He was in a space no more than four feet wide, but tall, and lit by a flickering light that chanced through cracks in the inner wall. Barberio was too befuddled to recognize the origins of the light, and his murmuring ears couldn’t make sense of the dialogue from the screen on the other side of the wall. It was “Satyricon,” the second of the two Fellini movies the Palace was showing as their late-night double feature that Saturday.

  Barberio had never seen the movie, never even heard of Fellini. It would have disgusted him (faggot film, Italian crap). He preferred undersea adventures, war movies. Oh, and dancing girls. Anything with dancing girls.

  Funny, thou
gh he was all alone in his hidey hole, he had the weird sensation of being watched. Through the kaleidoscope of Busby Berkeley routines that was playing on the inside of his skull he felt eyes, not a few—thousands—watching him. The feeling wasn’t so bad you’d want to take a drink for it, but they were always there, staring away at him like he was something worth looking at, laughing at him sometimes, crying sometimes, but mostly just gawping with hungry eyes.

  Truth was, there was nothing he could do about them anyhow. His limbs had given up the ghost; he couldn’t feel his hands or feet at all. He didn’t know, and it was probably better that he didn’t, that he’d torn open his wound getting into this place, and he was bleeding to death.

  About two-fifty-five a.m., as Fellini’s “Satyricon” came to its ambiguous end, Barberio died in the space between the back of the building proper and the back wall of the cinema.

  The Movie Palace had once been a Mission Hall, and if he’d looked up as he died he might have glimpsed the inept fresco depicting an Angelic Host that was still to be seen through the grime, and assumed his own Assumption. But he died watching the dancing girls, and that was fine by him.

  The false wall, the one that let through the light from the back of the screen, had been erected as a makeshift partition to cover the fresco of the Host. It had seemed more respectful to do that than paint the Angels out permanently, and besides the man who had ordered the alterations half-suspected that the movie house bubble would burst sooner or later. If so, he could simply demolish the wall, and he’d be back in business for the worship of God instead of Garbo.

  It never happened. The bubble, though fragile, never burst, and the movies carried on. The Doubting Thomas (his name was Harry Cleveland) died, and the space was forgotten. Nobody now living even knew it existed. If he’d searched the city from top to bottom Barberio couldn’t have found a more secret place to perish.