Weaveworld by Clive Barker Page B

escape. He’d coveredmaybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister’s children. He was glad of the darkness; at least he couldn’t see their deformities. But he felt their limbs upon him; heard their teeth snapping at his neck.
    They didn’t intend to devour him, however. At some cue he neither saw nor heard, their violence dwindled to mere bondage. He was held fast, his body so knotted up his joints creaked, while a terrible spectacle unfolded a few yards in front of him.
    It was one of Immacolata’s sisters, he had no doubt of that: a naked woman whose substance flickered and smoked as though her marrow was on fire, except that she could have no marrow, for surely she had no bones. Her body was a column of grey gas, laced with strands of bloody tissue, and from this flux fragments of finished anatomy emerged: a seeping breast, a belly swollen as if by a pregnancy months beyond its term, a smeared face in which the eyes were sewn-up slits. That explained, no doubt, her hesitant advance, and the way her smoky limbs extended from her body to test the ground ahead: the ghost was blind.
    By the light this unholy mother gave off, Cal could see the children more clearly. No perversion of anatomy had been overlooked amongst them: bodies turned inside out to parade the bowel and stomach; organs whose function seemed simply to seep and wheeze lining the belly of one like teats, and mounted like a coxcomb on another’s head. Yet despite their corruptions, their heads were all turned adoringly upon Mama Pus, their eyes unblinking so as not to miss a moment of her presence. She was their mother; they her loving children.
    Suddenly, she started to shriek. Cal turned to look at her again. She’d taken up a squatting posture, her legs splayed, her head thrown back as she voiced her agony.
    Behind her there now stood a second ghost, as naked as the first. More so perhaps, for she could scarcely lay claim to flesh.She was obscenely withered, her dugs like empty purses, her face collapsed upon itself in a jumble of tooth-shard and hair. She’d taken hold of her squatting sister, whose scream had now reached a nerve-shredding height. As the swollen belly came close to bursting, there was an issue of smouldering matter from between the mother’s legs. The sight was greeted with a chorus of welcomes from the children. They were entranced. So, in his horrified way, was Cal.
    Mama Pus was giving birth.
    The scream became a series of smaller, rhythmic shouts as the child began its journey into the living world. It was less born than shat, dropping from between its parent’s legs like a vast mewling turd. No sooner had it hit the ground than the withered midwife was about her business, coming between mother and spectators to draw away veils of redundant matter from the child’s body. The mother, her labours over, stood up, the flame in her flesh dying, and left the child to her sister’s ministrations.
    Now Shadwell came back into view. He looked down at Cal.
    ‘Do you see?’ he said, his voice all but a whisper, ‘what kind of horrors these are? I warned you. Tell me where the carpet is and I’ll try to make sure the child doesn’t touch you.’
    ‘I don’t know. I swear I don’t.’
    The midwife had withdrawn. Shadwell, a sham of pity on his face, now did the same.
    In the dirt a few yards from Cal the child was already standing up. It was the size of a chimpanzee, and shared with its siblings the appearance of something traumatically wounded. Portions of its inner workings were teased out through its skin, leaving its torso to collapse upon itself in places and in others sport ludicrous appendages of gut. Twin rows of dwarf limbs hung from its belly, and between its legs a sizeable scrotum depended, smoking