Read Online Cabal by Clive Barker - Free Book Online Page A

was so luxuriant and so dark her face looked sickly in its frame. Her mouth, which was her mother’s mouth to the last flute, was naturally, even indecently, red, but taming its colour with a pale lipstick merely made her eyes look vaster and more vulnerable than ever.
    It wasn’t that the sum of her features was unattractive. She’d had more than her share of men at her feet. No, the trouble was she didn’t look the way she felt. It was a
sweet
face, and she wasn’t sweet; didn’t want to
be
sweet, or
thought of
as sweet. Perhaps the powerful feelings that had touched her in the last few hours – seeing the blood, seeing the tombs – would make their mark in time. She hoped so. The memory of them moved in her still, and she was richer for them, however painful they’d been.
    Still naked, she wandered back into the bedroom. As she’d hoped the celebrants next door had quietened down. The music was no longer rock ‘n’ roll, but something smoochy. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her palms back and forth over her breasts, enjoying their smoothness. Her breath had taken on the slow rhythm of the music through the wall; music for dancing groin to groin, mouth to mouth. She lay back on the bed, her right hand sliding down her body. She could smell several months’ accrual of cigarette smoke in the coverlet she lay on. It made the room seem almost a public place, with its nightly comings and goings. The thought of her nakedness in such a room, and the smell of her skin’s cleanliness on this stale bed, was acutely arousing.
    She eased her first and middle fingers into her cunt, raising her hips a little to meet the exploration. This was a joy she offered herself all too seldom; her Catholic upbringing had put guilt between her instinct and her fingertips. But tonight she was a different woman. She found the gasping places quickly, putting her feet on the edge of the bed and spreading her legs wide to give both hands a chance to play.
    It wasn’t Boone she pictured as the first waves of gooseflesh came. Dead men were bad lovers. Better she forgot him. His face had been pretty, but she’d never kiss it again. His cock had been pretty too, but she’d never stroke it, or have it in her again. All she had was herself, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That was what she pictured now: the very act she was performing. A clean body naked on a stale bed. A woman in a strange room enjoying her own strange self.
    The rhythm of the music no longer moved her. She had her own rhythm, rising and falling, rising and falling, each time climbing higher. There was no peak. Just height after height, till she was running with sweat and gorged on sensation. She lay still for several minutes. Then, knowing sleep was quickly overtaking her and that she could scarcely pass the night in her present position, she threw off all the covers but a single sheet, put her head on the pillow, and fell into the space behind her closed eyes.
2
    The sweat on her body cooled beneath the thin sheet. In sleep, she was at Midian’s necropolis, the wind coming to meet her down its avenues from all directions at once – north, south, east and west – chilling her as it whipped her hair above her head, and ran up inside her blouse. The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.
    It was only as the dust blinded her completely that she realized what it was – the remains of the dead, the ancient dead, blown on contrary winds from pyramids and mausoleums, from vaults and dolmen, charnel houses and crematoria. Coffin-dust, and human ash, and bone pounded to bits, all blown to Midian, and catching her at the crossroads.
    She felt the dead inside her. Behind her lids; in her throat; carried up towards her womb. And despite the chill, and the fury of the four storms, she had no fear