Weaveworld

by Clive Barker

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes, the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world. It must be arbitrary then, the place at which we choose to embark. Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed.

He’d always been a solitary child, as much through choice as circumstance, happiest when he could unshackle his imagination and let it wander. It took little to get such journeys started. Looking back, it seemed he’d spent half his school days gazing out of the window, transported by a line of poetry whose meaning he couldn’t quite unearth, or the sound of someone singing in a distant classroom, into a world more pungent and more remote than the one he knew. A world whose scents were carried to his nostrils by winds mysteriously warm in a chill December; whose creatures paid him homage on certain nights at the foot of his bed, and whose peoples he conspired with in sleep. But despite the familiarity of this place, the comfort he felt there, its precise nature and location remained elusive, and though he’d read every book he could find that promised some rare territory, he always came away disappointed. They were too perfect, those childhood kingdoms; all honey and summer. The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.

Everything he’d ever wanted had been in that land; he knew it. Everything his education had taught him to disbelieve — all miracles, all mystery, all blue shadow and sweet-breathed spirits. All the pigeon knew, all the wind knew, all the human world had once grasped and now forgotten, all of it was wailing in that place. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Which probably made him insane.

All she knew was that she was suddenly alive to a space inside herself where the haste and habit of her adult life had no dominion. She sensed the passions that drifted in that space only vaguely, as her fingertips might sense fog. But she would come to know them better with time, those passions, and the acts that they’d engender: she was certain of that as she’d been certain of nothing in days. She’d know them — and, God help her — she’d love them as her own.

Experience had taught her much: and most of the news was bad. But these stories taught different lessons. That sleep resembled death, for instance, was no revelation; but that death might with kisses be healed into mere sleep … that was knowledge of a different order. Mere wish-fulfillment, she chided herself. Real life had no miracles to offer. The devouring beast, if cut open, did not disgorge its victims unharmed. Peasants were not raised overnight to princedom, nor was evil ever vanquished by a union of true hearts. They were the kind of illusions that the pragmatist she’d striven so hard to be had kept at bay. Yet the stories moved her. She couldn’t deny it. And they moved her in a way only true things could. It wasn’t sentiment that brought tears to her eyes. The stories weren’t sentimental. They were tough, even cruel. No, what made her weep was being reminded of an inner life she’d been so familiar with as a child; a life that was both an escape from, and a revenge upon, the pains and frustrations of childhood; a life that was neither mawkish nor unknowing; a life of mind-places — haunted, soaring — that she’d chosen to forget when she’d took up the cause of adulthood. More than that, in this reunion with the tales that had given her a mythology, she found images that might help her fathom her present confusion.