Books of Blood, Vol. 1

by Clive Barker

The famous had come to this Wailing Wall—Mussolini was there, Lennon and Janis Joplin—and nobodies too, forgotten people, had signed themselves beside the greats. It was a roll-call of the dead, and it was growing day by day, as though word of mouth was spreading amongst the lost tribes, and seducing them out of silence to sign this barren room with their sacred presence.

It was a fine game.

Ruh-roh

The world was opening up: throwing her senses into an ecstasy, coaxing them into a wild confusion of functions. She was capable, suddenly, of knowing the world as a system, not of politics or religions, but as a system of senses, a system that spread out from the living flesh to the inert wood of her desk, to the stale gold of her wedding ring.

It saw another sight, the lie in him, the absence of power where she’d thought there had been something wonderful. He had no talent to commune with ghosts, nor had ever had, she saw this plainly. He was a little liar, a boy-liar, a sweet, white boy-liar without the compassion or the wisdom to understand what he had dared to do.

Pinhead wants that twink obliterated

Of all the powers that made the system manifest, love, and its companion, passion, and their companion, loss, were the most potent.

Good StuffTM

The ether-faces of the dead were quite clear in front of her. She could see the profundity of their suffering and she could sympathize with their ache to be heard.

Today there would be no such mercy given, she knew for certain. The ghosts had despaired on the highway a grieving age, bearing the wounds they had died with, and the insanities they had slaughtered with. They had endured his levity and insolence, his idiocies, the fabrications that had made a game of their ordeals. They wanted to speak the truth.

FuckyeahFUCKYEAH

He was inert stuff already: as fit for this indignity as wood or steel.

She thought of the grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she’d seen them, touched them. She thought of the tattoos she’d seen: freak show exhibits some of them, others just shirtless laborers in the street with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not unknown, to write a book of blood.

They swarmed around him, deaf to any plea or prayer, and worked on him with all the enthusiasm of creatures forced into silence for too long.

On the middle landing of Number 65 the smoking, blistered body of Reg Fuller was casually trodden by the travelers’ feet as they passed over the intersection. At length Fuller’s own soul came by in the throng and glanced down at the flesh he had once occupied, before the crowd pressed him on toward his judgment.

So read. Read and learn. It’s best to be prepared for the worst, after all, and wise to learn to walk before breath runs out.

It was no Palace of Delights. It bred death, not pleasure.

It was simply further proof of his city’s decadence. He could take no pleasure in her sickness.

Kaufman slowly exhaled through his nose, feeling the tension in his body abate. He hated that sort of confrontation: it made him feel tongue-tied and ineffectual. Come to think of it, he hated that kind of man: the opinionated brute that New York bred so well.

#relatable

Sometimes Mahogany longed to announce his identity to the world, but he had responsibilities and they bore on him heavily. He couldn’t expect fame. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for recognition. After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to its knees?

Until— —his heel slipped. He looked down. His stomach almost saw the blood before his brain and the ham on whole wheat was halfway up his gullet catching in the back of his throat. Blood. He took several large gulps of stale air and looked away—back at the window.

Whichever way he turned, the name on the door was Death.

There was nothing very remarkable about it. It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally shaped. The body was small, and the effort of climbing into the train made its breath coarse. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic; generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its distressing vulnerability.

RULES

Worse sights than the naked amongst them were those who wore a veil of clothes. It soon dawned on Kaufman that the rotting fabric slung around their shoulders or knotted about their midriffs was made of human skins. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each other, like pathetic trophies.

“You,” it said. The voice was as wasted as the lips it came from.

Kaufman looked away, and walked back to the train. Every part of his body seemed to be weeping but his eyes. They were too hot with the sight behind him, they boiled his tears away.

It feared ulcers, it feared psychosomatic leprosy (condition lower demons like itself were susceptible to), worst of all it feared losing its temper completely and killing the man outright in an uncontrollable fit of pique.

Events seemed to make no dent in his perfect indifference. His life’s disasters seemed not to scar his mind at all. When, eventually, he was confronted with the truth about his wife’s infidelity (he found them screwing in the bath) he couldn’t bring himself to be hurt or humiliated. “These things happen,” he said to himself, backing out of the bathroom to let them finish what they’d started. “Que sera, sera.”

But no. It was the Christmas tree that was whining, whining like a pack of dogs, as it spun and spun.

RTD is obviously a Barker person too

It was not an ambitious creature. All it wanted at that moment, beyond any other dream, was to take this human’s skull between its palms and make a nonsense of it. Crush it to smithereens, and pour the hot thought out on to the snow. To be done with Jack J. Polo, forever and forever. Was that so much to ask?

Her voice was a pig’s voice, her complaints a pig’s complaints. Hysterical grunts escaped her lips and she hurtled across the forecourt of the sty and out of the broken gate, trampling Leverthal. The sow’s body, still burning, was a magic thing in the night as she careered across the field, weaving about in her pain. Her cries did not diminish as the dark ate her up, they seemed just to echo back and forth across the field, unable to find a way out of the locked room.

He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practiced until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labor ‘til doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that was Diane Duvall.

Barker is absolutely The Theatre Kid's horror writer

It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Calloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.

“A great while ago the world began, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done And we’ll strive to please you every day.”