Weaveworld

by Clive Barker

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.