Books of Blood: Volume 2 (Books of Blood #2)

by Clive Barker

There is no delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the innuendo, and there, nestling at the heart of the discourse, is dread.

“Philosophy. True philosophy. It’s a beast, Stephen. Don’t you think?” “I hadn’t—” “It’s wild. It bites.” He grinned, suddenly vulpine. “Yes. It bites,” he replied.

Philosophy was a way to talk about fear.

“I fear, you fear, we fear,” Quaid was fond of saying. “He, she or it fears. There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.”

“What I fear is personal to me. It makes no sense in a larger context. The signs of my dread, the images my brain uses, if you like, to illustrate my fear, those signs are mild stuff by comparison with the real horror that’s at the root of my personality.”

It’s only when you’ve lost someone, you realize the nonsense of that phrase “it’s a small world.” It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.

Monster he calls me: monster I am.

With a final swoop to its voice, which took the whistle out of human hearing, it bent upon the car, smashing the windshield and curling its mouthed hands upon the roof. It then proceeded to tear the steel back like so much paper, its body twitching with glee, its head jerking about. Once the roof was torn up, it leaped onto the highway and threw the metal into the air. It turned in the sky and smashed down on the desert floor. Davidson briefly wondered what he could possibly put on the insurance form.

Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.

“Just die. There’s nothing left for us, Lewis. The world’s too hard.” Lewis thought of the snow, and the ice-floes, and saw the sense in dying.

That night, in the safety of his cell, Phillipe woke. It was warm, but he was cold. In the utter dark he chewed at his wrists until a pulse of blood bubbled into his mouth. He lay back on his bed, and quietly splashed and fountained away to death, out of sight and out of mind.