The Thief of Always: A Fable

by Clive Barker

THE GREAT grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter.

She had a face like a rolled-up ball of cobwebs, from which her hair, which could also have been spiders’ work, fell in wispy abundance.

a moon as wide and as white as a dead man’s smile.

the trees that had shaded them by day now looked frightful in their nakedness, gaunt and hungry.

a firework erupted into a shower of green sparks, its light making a gangrenous cavern of the grove.

There was a lesson there, if he could only remember it. Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite.

‘To die,’ she said, with a little smile. ‘To slip out of this skin, and go to the stars.’

I take time. You take lives. But in the end we’re the same: both Thieves of Always.’

There was debris in the air of course: petals and leaves, dust and ash. They fell like a dream rain, though their fall marked the end of a dream.

Harvey wished he had some words to persuade her to stay a little while longer. But even if he’d had such words, he knew it would have been selfish to speak them. Mrs Griffin had another life to go to, where every soul shone.

and it shattered like a sphere of spun sugar,