The Inhuman Condition Read online

  The Inhuman Condition

  Books of Blood, Volume IV

  by Clive Barker

  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

  POSEIDON PRESS New York

  Copyright (c) 1986 by Clive Barker

  All rights reserved, 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 AmericasNew York, New York 10020

  POSEIDON PRESS is a registered trademarkof Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd.under the title Books of Blood, Volume IV

  Designed by Irving Perkins Associates

  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 Pentonville-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 BODY POLITIC

  WHENEVER HE woke, Charlie George's hands stood Perhaps he would be feeling too hot under the blankets and

  have to throw a couple over to Ellen's side of the bed. Perhaps he might even get up, still half-asleep, and pad through to the kitchen to pour himself a tumbler of iced apple juice. Then back to bed, slipping in beside Ellen's gentle crescent, to let sleep drift over him. They'd wait then, until his eyes had flickered closed and his breathing become regular as clockwork, and they were certain he was sound asleep. Only then, when they knew consciousness was gone, would they dare to begin their secret lives again.

  FOR months now Charlie had been waking up with an uncomfortable ache in his wrists and hands.

  "Go and see a doctor," Ellen would tell him, unsympathetic as ever. 'Why won't you go and see a doctor?"

  He hated doctors, that was why. Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?

  "I've probably been working too hard," he told himself.

  "Some chance," Ellen muttered.

  Surely that was the likeliest explanation. He was a packager by trade; he worked with his hands all day long. They got tired. It was only natural.

  "Stop fretting, Charlie," he told his reflection one morning as he slapped some life into his face, "your hands are fit for anything."

  So, night after night, the routine was the same. It goes like this:

  The Georges are asleep, side by side in their marital bed. He on his back, snoring gently; she curled up on his left-hand side. Charlie's head is propped up on two thick pillows. His jaw is slightly ajar, and beneath the vein-shot veil of his lids his eyes scan some dreamed adventure. Maybe a fire fighter tonight, perhaps a heroic dash into the heart of some burning brothel. He dreams contentedly; sometimes frowning, sometimes smirking.

  There is a movement under the sheet. Slowly, cautiously it seems, Charlie's hands creep up out of the warmth of the bed and into the open air. Their index fingers weave like nailed heads as they meet on his undulating abdomen. They clasp each other in greeting, like comrades-in-arms. In his sleep Charlie moans. The brothel has collapsed on him. The hands flatten themselves instantly, pretending innocence. After a moment, once the even rhythm of his breathing has resumed, they begin their debate in earnest.

  A casual observer, sifting at the bottom of the Georges' bed, might take this exchange as a sign of some mental disorder in Charlie. The way his hands twitch and pluck at each other, stroking each other now, now seeming to fight. But there's clearly some code or sequence in their movements, however spasmodic. One might almost think that the slumbering man was deaf and dumb, and talking in his sleep. But the hands are speaking no recognizable sign language; nor are they trying to communicate with anyone but each other. This is a clandestine meeting, held purely between Charlie's hands. There they will stay through the night, perched on his stomach, plotting against the body politic.

  CHARLIE wasn't entirely ignorant of the sedition that was simmering at his wrists. There was a fumbling suspicion in him that something in his life was not quite right. Increasingly, he had the sense of being cut off from common experience, becoming more and more a spectator to the daily (and nightly) rituals of living, rather than a participant. Take, for example, his love life.

  He had never been a great lover, but neither did he feel he had anything to apologize for. Ellen seemed satisfied with his attentions. But these days he felt dislocated from the act. He would watch his hands traveling over Ellen, touching her with all the intimate skill they knew, and he would view their maneuvers as if from a great distance, unable to enjoy the sensations of warmth and wetness. Not that his digits were any less agile. Quite the reverse. Ellen had recently taken to kissing his fingers and telling him how clever they were. Her praise didn't reassure him one iota. If anything, it made him feel worse to think that his hands were giving such pleasure when he was feeling nothing.

  There were other signs of his instability too. Small, irritating signs. He had become conscious of how his fingers beat out martial rhythms on the boxes he was sealing up at the factory, and the way his hands had taken to breaking pencils, snapping them into tiny pieces before he realized quite what he (they) were doing, leaving shards of wood and graphite scattered across the packing room floor.

  Most embarrassingly, he had found himself holding hands with total strangers. This had happened on three separate occasions. Once at a bus-stop, and twice in the elevator at the factory. It was, he told himself, nothing more than the primitive urge to hold on to another person in a changing world; that was the best explanation he could muster. Whatever the reason, it was damned disconcerting, especially when he found himself surreptitiously holding hands with his own foreman. Worse still, the other man's hand had grasped Charlie's in return, and the men had found themselves looking down their arms like two dog owners watching their unruly pets copulating at the ends of their leashes.

  Increasingly, Charlie had taken to peering at the palms of his hands looking for hair. That was the first sign of madness, his mother had once warned him. Not the hair, the looking.

  Now it became a race against time. Debating on his belly at night, his hands knew very well how critical Charlie's state of mind had become. It could only be a matter of days before his careering imagination alighted on the truth.

  So what to do? Risk an early severance, with all the possible consequences, or let Charlie's instability take its own, unpredictable, course, with the chance of his discovering the plot on his way to madness? The debates became more heated. Left, as ever, was cautious: "What if we re wrong, it would rap, "and there's no life after the body?"
>
  "Then we will never know," Right would reply.

  Left would ponder that problem a moment. Then: "How will we do it, when the time comes?"

  It was a vexing question and Left knew it troubled the leader more than any other. "How?" it would ask again, pressing the advantage. "How? How?"

  "We'll find a way," Right would reply. "As long as it's a clean cut."

  "Suppose he resists?"

  "A man resists with his hands. His hands will be in revolution against him."

  "And which of us will it be?"

  "He uses me most effectively," Right would reply, "so I must wield the weapon. You will go.

  Left would be silent a while then. They had never been apart all these years. It was not a comfortable thought.

  "Later, you can come back for me," Right would say.

  "I will."

  "You must. I am the Messiah. Without me there will be nowhere to go. You must raise an army, then come and fetch me.

  THE BODY POLITIC 63

  "To the ends of the earth, if necessary.

  "Don't be sentimental."

  Then they'd embrace, like long-lost brothers, swearing fidelity forever. Ah, such hectic nights, full of the exhilaration of planned rebellion. Even during the day, when they had sworn to stay apart, it was impossible sometimes not to creep together in an idle moment and tap each other. To say:

  Soon, soon, to say:

  Again tonight: I'll meet you on his stomach, to say:

  What will it be like, when the world is ours?

  CHARLIE knew he was close to a nervous breakdown. He found himself glancing down at his hands on occasion, to watch them with their index fingers in the air like the heads of long-necked beasts sensing the horizon. He found himself staring at the hands of other people in his paranoia, becoming obsessed with the way hands spoke a language of their own, independent of their user's intentions. The seductive hands of the virgin secretary, the maniacal hands of a killer he saw on the television protesting his innocence. Hands that betrayed their owners with every gesture, contradicting anger with apology, and love with fury. They seemed to be everywhere, these signs of mutiny. Eventually he knew he had to speak to somebody before he lost his sanity.

  He chose Ralph Fry from Accounting, a sober, uninspiring man, whom Charlie trusted. Ralph was very understanding.

  "You get these things," he said. "I got them when Yvonne left me. Terrible nervous fits."

  "What did you do about it?"

  "Saw a headshrinker. Name of Jeudwine. You should try Some therapy. You'll be a changed man."

  Charlie turned the idea over in his mind. "Why not?" he said after a few revolutions. "Is he expensive?"

  "Yes, But he's good. Got rid of my twitches for me; no trouble. I mean, till I went to him I thought I was your average guy with marital problems. Now look at me," Fry made an expansive gesture, "I've got so many suppressed libidinal urges I don't know where to start." He grinned like a loon. "But I'm happy as a clam. Never been happier. Give him a try; he'll soon tell you what turns you on.

  "The problem isn't sex," Charlie told Fry.

  "Take it from me," said Fry with a knowing smirk. "The problem's always sex.

  THE next day Charlie rang Dr. Jeudwine, without telling Ellen, and the shrink's secretary arranged an initial session. Charlie's palms sweated so much while he made the telephone call he thought the receiver was going to slide right out of his hand, but when he'd done it he felt better.

  Ralph Fry was right, Dr. Jeudwine was a good man. He didn't laugh at any of the little fears Charlie unburdened. Quite the contrary, he listened to every word with the greatest concern. It was very reassuring.

  During their third session together, the doctor brought one particular memory back to Charlie with spectacular vividness: his father's hands, crossed on his barrel chest as he lay in his coffin; the ruddy color of them, the coarse hair that matted their backs. The absolute authority of those wide hands, even in death, had haunted Charlie for months afterward. And hadn't he imagined, as he'd watched the body being consigned to humus, that it was not yet still? That the hands were even now beating a tattoo on the casket lid, demanding to be let out? It was a preposterous thing to think, but bringing it out into the open did Charlie a lot of good. In the bright light of Jeudwine's office the fantasy looked insipid and ridiculous. It shivered under the doctor's gaze, protesting that the light was too strong, and then it blew away, too frail to stand up to scrutiny.

  The exorcism was far easier than Charlie had anticipated. All it had taken was a little probing and that childhood nonsense bad been dislodged from his psyche like a morsel of bad meat from between his teeth. It could rot there no longer. And for his part Jeudwine was clearly delighted with the results, explaining when it was all done that this particular obsession had been new to him, and he was pleased to have dealt with the problem. Hands as symbols of paternal power, he said, were not common. Usually the penis predominated in his patients' dreams, he explained, to which Charlie had replied that hands had always seemed far more important than private parts. After all, they could change the world, couldn't they?

  After Jeudwine, Charlie didn't stop breaking pencils or drumming his fingers. In fact if anything the tempo was brisker and more insistent than ever. But he reasoned that middle-aged dogs didn't quickly forget their tricks, and it would take some time for him to regain his equilibrium.

  So the revolution remained underground. It had, however, been a narrow escape. Clearly there was no time left for prevarication. The rebels had to act.

  Unwittingly, it was Ellen who instigated the final uprising. It was after a bout of lovemaking late one Thursday evening. A hot night, though it was October, the window was ajar and the curtains parted a few inches to let in a simpering breeze. Husband and wife lay together under a single sheet. Charlie had fallen asleep even before the sweat on his neck had dried. Beside him Ellen was still awake, her head propped up on a rock-hard pillow, her eyes wide open. Sleep wouldn't come for a long time tonight, she knew. It would be one of those nights when her body would itch, and every lump in the bed would worm its way under her, and every doubt she'd ever had would gawk at her from the dark. She wanted to empty her bladder (she always did after sex) but she couldn't quite raise the will power to get up and go to the bathroom. The longer she left it the more she'd need to go, of course, and the less she'd be able to sink into sleep. Damn stupid situation, she thought, then lost track, among her anxieties, of what situation it was that was so stupid.

  At her side Charlie moved in his sleep. Just his hands, twitch mg away. She looked at his face. He was positively cherubic in sleep, looking younger than his forty-one years, despite the white flecks in his sideburns. She liked him enough to say she loved him, she supposed, but not enough to forgive him his trespasses. He was lazy, he was always complaining. Aches, pains. And there were those evenings he'd not come in until late (they'd stopped recently), when she was sure he was seeing another woman. As she watched, his hands appeared. They emerged from beneath the sheet like two arguing children, digits stabbing the air for emphasis.

  She frowned, not quite believing what she was seeing. It was like watching the television with the sound turned down, a dumb show for eight fingers and two thumbs. As she gazed on, amazed, the hands scrambled up the side of Charlie's carcass and peeled the sheet back from his belly, exposing the hair that thickened toward his privates. His appendix scar, shinier than the surrounding skin, caught the light. There, on his stomach, his hands seemed to sit.

  The argument between them was especially vehement tonight. Left, always the more conservative of the two, was arguing for a delay in the severance date, but Right was beyond waiting. The time had come, it argued, to test their strength against the tyrant and to overthrow the body once and for all. As it was, the decision didn't rest with them any longer.

  Ellen raised her head from the pillow, and for the first time they sensed her gaze on them. They'd been too involved in their argument to notic
e her. Now, at last, their conspiracy was uncovered.

  "Charlie. .." she was hissing into the tyrant's ear, "stop it, Charlie. Stop it."

  Right raised index and middle fingers, sniffing her presence.

  "Charlie she said again. Why did he always sleep so deeply?

  "Charlie..." she shook him more violently as Right tapped Left, alerting it to the woman's stare. "Please Charlie, wake up."

  Without warning, Right leaped; Left was no more than a moment behind. Ellen yelled Charlie's name once more before they clamped themselves about her throat.

  In sleep Charlie was on a slave ship; the settings of his dreams were often B. de Mille exotica. In this epic his hands had been manacled together, and he was being hauled to the whipping block by his shackles to be punished for some undisclosed misdemeanor. But now, suddenly, he dreamed he was seizing the captain by his thin throat. There were howls from the slaves all around him, encouraging the strangulation. The captain-who looked not unlike Dr. Jeudwine-was begging him to stop in a voice that was high and frightened. It was almost a woman's voice; Ellen's voice. "Charlie!" he was squeaking, "don't!" But his silly complaints only made Charlie shake the man more violently than ever, and he was feeling quite the hero as the slaves, miraculously liberated, gathered around him in a gleeful throng to watch their master's last moments.

  The captain, whose face was purple, just managed to murmur "You're killing me before Charlie's thumbs dug one final time into his neck and dispatched the man. Only then, through the smoke of sleep, did he realize that his victim, though male, had no Adam's apple. And now the ship began to recede around him, the exhorting voices losing their vehemence. His eyes flickered open, and he was standing on the bed in his pajama bottoms, Ellen in his hands. Her face was dark and spotted with thick white spittle. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth. Her eyes were still open, and for a moment there seemed to be life there, gazing out from under the blinds of her lids. Then the windows were empty, and she went out of the house altogether.