Weaveworld (99 page)

Cal turned away from the window.

‘The garden,’ he said.

His legs felt as though they were made of cotton-wool; he needed Suzanna’s support to get him to the door. Together they started down the flight.

Gluck had heard the sound of breaking glass, and was half way up the stairs to investigate, a mug of tea in his hand. He’d seen wonders in his time, but the sight of Cal, telling him to get outside,
outside
, left him open-mouthed. By the time he’d found a question to ask, Cal and Suzanna were already half way down the second flight of stairs. He followed; into the hallway, and through the kitchen to the back door. Suzanna was unbolting it, top and bottom.

Though there had been winter at the window, it was spring that awaited them on the threshold.

And in the garden itself, spreading even as they watched, the source of that season: the home of their joy forever; the place they’d fought and almost died to save:

The Fugue.

It was emerging from the book’s scattered pages in all its singular majesty, defying ice and darkness as it had defied so much else. The months it had spent amongst the tales in the book had not been wasted. It came with fresh mysteries and enchantments.

Here, in time, Suzanna would rediscover the Old Science, and with it heal ancient breaches. Here too, in some unimaginable year, Cal would go to live in a house on the borders of the Gyre, to which one day a young man would come whose history he knew. It was all ahead, all they’d dreamed together, all waiting to be born.

Even at that moment, in sleeping cities across the Isle, the refugees were waking and rising from their pillows, and throwing open the doors and windows, despite the cold, to meet the news the night was bringing them: that what could be imagined need never be lost. That even here, in the Kingdom, rapture might find a home.

After tonight there would be only one world, to live in and to dream; and Wonderland would never be more than a step away, a thought away.

Together Cal, Suzanna and Gluck left the house and went walking in that magic night.

Ahead, there were such sights unfolding: friends and places
they’d feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture.

There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and midnight glory. Time in abundance.

For nothing ever begins.

And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.

About the Author

Clive Barker is a man of astonishing creativity – author, artist and film-maker; he has taken the worlds of the fantastique and horror and made them his own. Born in Liverpool in 1952, Clive studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University before moving to London. Running parallel with his publishing successes is a flourishing career as a film-maker. Barker’s directorial debut,
Hellraiser
, touched new heights of horror and earned him world-wide recognition. Clive moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to pursue his two careers more effectively. In true Hollywood style he lives in Beverly Hills in a house with a history that dates back to the early 1920s.

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Also By Clive Barker

The Books of Blood, Volumes I-VI
The Damnation Game
Weaveworld
Cabal
The Great and Secret Show
The Hellhound Heart
Imajica
The Thief of Always
Everville
Incarnations
Forms of Heaven
Sacrament
Galilee
The Essential Clive Barker
Coldheart Canyon
Abarat
Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War
Mister B. Gone

Imajica

Clive Barker

AS MYSTERIOUS AS THE FACE OF GOD,
AS SECRET AS THE HUMAN SOUL

The Imajica – five Dominions, four reconciled, and one, the Earth, cut off from them, her inhabitants living in ignorance on the edge of a sea of possibilities, an ocean of mystery and magic. Only a few know of the Imajica, and many of them are frightened, for a shining mystical moment is approaching, a time when the Earth can be reunited with the other four Dominions – a time of Reconciliation

Racing to capture that moment are three memorable characters: Gentle, a master forger whose own life is a series of lies, Judith Odell, a beautiful woman desired by three powerful men, but belonging to none of them, and Pie’oh’pah, a mysterious assassin who deals in love as well as death. Together they embark on an epic journey through all five Dominions to the very border of the greatest mystery of all: the First Dominion, on the other side of which lies the Holy City of the Unbeheld, where their greatest hopes, or their deepest fears, will be realized.

‘The tears and blood and nightmare imagery are passionate and ingenious.
Imajica
is a ride with remarkable views’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Barker’s fecundity of invention is beyond praise. In a world of hard-hitting horror and originality, Clive Barker dislocates your mind’

Mail on Sunday

‘An astonishing feat of the imagination, immensely engrossing, running riot with ideas, fantastical inventions, soul-terrors and emotional and intellectual resonances. Barker’s best yet’

Kirkus Reviews

ISBN 0 00 617804 9

The Hellbound Heart

Clive Barker

The classic novella filmed as
Hellraiser.

At last he had solved the puzzle of Lemarchand’s box. He was standing on the threshold of a new world of heightened sensations.

In moments the Cenobites – who had dedicated an eternity to the pursuit of sensuality – would be here. They would reveal the dark secrets that would transform him for ever.

But with the exquisite pleasure would come pain beyond imagining. To escape his hideous tormentors and return to this world, he would need the help of his brother’s wife Julia, the woman who loved him. But most of all he would need blood.

‘A real marrow-melter … it plays on the darkest fears and fantastical obsessions of the human psyche: chilling and compelling.’

Scotsman

ISBN: 0 00 647065 3

The Thief of Always

Clive Barker

A disturbing fable exploring childhood fears and delights from the maestro of dark fantasy.

Mr Hood’s Holiday House has stood for a thousand years, welcoming countless children into its embrace. It is a place of miracles, a blissful round of treats and seasons, where every childish whim may be satisfied.

There is a price to be paid, of course, but young Harvey Swick, bored with his life and beguiled by Mr Hood’s wonders, does not stop to consider the consequences. It is only when the House shows its darker face – when Harvey discovers the pitiful creatures that dwell in its shadow – that he comes to doubt Mr Hood’s philanthropy.

The House and its mysterious architect are not about to release their captive without a battle, however. Mr Hood has ambitions for his new guest, for Harvey’s soul burns brighter than any soul he has encountered in a thousand years …

‘A dashingly produced fantasy with powerful drawings by the author’

Daily Telegraph

‘Barker puts the dark side back into childhood fantasy … A welcome modern-day return to classic form, this fable lives up to the publishers’ billing as a tale for all ages’

Publishers Weekly

ISBN 0 00 647311 3

Abarat

Clive Barker

Candy lives in Chickentown USA: the most boring place in the world, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future may hold. She is soon to find out: swept out of our world by a giant wave, she finds herself in another place entirely …

The ABARAT: a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day, from the sunlit wonders of Three in the Afternoon, where dragons roam, to the dark terrors of the island of Midnight, ruled by Christopher Carrion.

Candy has a place in this extraordinary world: she has been brought here to help save the Abarat from the dark forces that are stirring at its heart. Forces older than Time itself, and more evil than anything Candy has ever encountered. She’s a strange heroine, she knows. But this is a strange world.

0 00 651370 0

Everville

Clive Barker

Five years ago, in his bestseller
The Great and Secret Show
, Clive Barker mesmerised millions of readers worldwide with an extraordinary vision of human passions and possibilities. Welcome to a new volume in that epic adventure. Welcome to
Everville.

On a mountain peak, high above the city of Everville, a door stands open: a door that opens onto the shores of the dream-sea Quiddity. And there’s not a soul below who’ll not be changed by that fact…

Phoebe Cobb is about to forget her old life and go looking for her lost lover Joe Flicker in the world on the other side of that door; a strange, sensual wonderland the likes of which only Barker could make real.

Tesla Bombeck who knows what horrors lurk on the far side of Quiddity, must solve the mysteries of the city’s past if she is to keep those horrors from crossing the threshold.

Harry D’Amour, who has tracked the ultimate evil across America, will find it conjuring atrocities in the sunlit streets of Everville.

Step into Everville’s streets, and enter a world like no other…

‘Clive Barker is so good I am almost tongue-tied. What Barker does makes the rest of us look like we’ve been asleep for the last ten years … His stories are compulsorily readable and original. He is an important, exciting and enormously saleable writer.’

Stephen King

ISBN 0 00 647225 7

Sacrament

Clive Barker

Will Rabjohns has everything. He’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s revered as the world’s greatest wildlife photographer. He’s also a haunted man, driven to risk his life for his art – to capture the raw tragedy of the wild, the beauty of nature’s violence.

After a near fatal encounter with a polar bear, he lies in a coma. There he must relive a central childhood memory: a meeting with ancient and terrible forces which revealed to him the mystery at the heart of nature. And he realizes that if he awakes, he must confront the darkness of his past and wage a war, not only for his own soul, but for the soul of the planet and every animal that breathes upon it.

‘A gripping book that weaves a compulsive spell … vintage Barker.’

The Times

‘Barker’s unique brand of eco-mysticism weaves as potent a spell as ever.’

Maxim

‘The premier metaphysicist of contemporary fiction. Breathtaking.’

Locus

ISBN: 0 00 648264 3

Mister B. Gone

By Clive Barker

Mister B. Gone marks the long-awaited return of Clive Barker, the great master of the macabre, to the classic horror story. This bone-chilling novel, in which a medieval devil speaks directly to his reader – his tone murderous one moment, seductive the next – is a never-before-published memoir allegedly penned in the year 1438. The demon has embedded himself in the very words of this tale of terror, turning the book itself into a dangerous object, laced with menace only too ready to break free and exert its power.

A brilliant and truly unsettling tour de force of the supernatural, Mister B. Gone escorts the reader on an intimate and revelatory journey to uncover the shocking truth of the battle between Good and Evil.

‘Barker’s fecundity of invention is beyond praise. In a world of hard-bitten horror and originality, Clive Barker dislocates your mind’

Mail on Sunday

‘An invocation of both magic and the imagination … A majestic maze of mythmaking’

Washington Times

ISBN: 978-0-00-727-628-8

£7.99

Copyright

Harper Voyager
HarperCollins
Publishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
1987

www.voyager-books.co.uk

This paperback edition 2009
1

Copyright © Clive Barker 1987
Introduction copyright © Clive Barker 1996
Drawings by Tim White

The publishers would like to acknowledge permission to quote from the following material.

Lines from
The Tryst
by Walter de la Mare published by permission of the Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and the Society of Authors as their representatives. Lines from
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem by permission of the Estate of Robert Frost and Jonathan Cape Ltd. Lines from
The Two
from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W.H. AUDEN reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

The Author asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library