Weaveworld. Клайв Баркер

wandered through to the hallway, looking everywhere (or some echo of what he’d experienced the day before). With every step he took his hopes fell further. Shadows there were, but they were deserted. The place was shorn of miracles. They’d gone when the carpet was removed.

      Half way up the stairs he halted. What was the use of going any further? It was apparent he’d missed his chance. If he was to rediscover the vision he’d glimpsed and lost he’d have to search elsewhere. It was mere doggedness, therefore – one of Eileen’s attributes – that made him continue to climb.

      At the top of the stairs the air was so leaden it made drawing breath a chore. That, and the fact that he felt like a trespasser today – unwelcome in this tomb – made him anxious to confirm his belief that the place had no magic to show him, then get gone.

      As he went to the door of the front bedroom something moved behind him. He turned. The labourers had piled several articles of furniture at the top of the stairs, then apparently decided they weren’t worth the sweat of moving any further. A chest of drawers, several chairs and tables. The sound had come from behind this furniture. And now it came again.

      Hearing it, he imagined rats. The sound suggested several sets of scurrying paws. Live and let live, he thought: he had no more right to be here than they did. Less, perhaps. They’d probably occupied the house for rat generations.

      He returned to the job at hand, pushed open the door, and stepped into the front room. The windows were grimy, and the stained lace curtains further clogged the light. There was a chair overturned on the bare boards, and three odd shoes had been placed on the mantelpiece by some wit. Otherwise empty.

      He stood for a few moments and then, hearing laughter in the street and needing its reassurance, crossed to the window and drew the curtain aside. But before he found the laughter’s source he forsook the search. His belly knew before his senses could confirm it that somebody had entered the room behind him. He let the curtain drop and looked around. A wide man in late middle-age, dressed too well for this dereliction, had joined him in the half-light. The threads of his grey jacket were almost iridescent. But more eye-catching still, his smile. A practised smile, belonging on an actor, or a preacher. Whichever, it was the expression of a man looking for converts.

      ‘Can I be of help?’ he said. His voice was resonant, and warm, but his sudden appearance had chilled Cal.

      ‘Help me?’ he said, floundering.

      ‘Are you perhaps interested in purchasing property?’ the other man said.

      ‘Purchasing? No … I … was just … you know … looking around.’

      ‘It’s a fine house,’ said the stranger, his smile as steady as a surgeon’s handshake, and as antiseptic. ‘Do you know much about houses?’ The line was spoken like its predecessors, without irony or malice. When Cal didn’t reply, the man said: ‘I’m a salesman. My name’s Shadwell.’ He teased the calf-skin glove from his thick-fingered hand. ‘And yours?’

      ‘Cal Mooney. Calhoun, that is.’

      The bare hand was extended. Cal took two steps towards the man – he was fully four inches taller than Cal’s five foot eleven – and shook hands. The man’s cool palm made Cal aware that he was sweating like a pig.

      The handshake broken, friend Shadwell unbuttoned his jacket, and opened it, to take a pen from his inside pocket. This casual action briefly revealed the lining of the Salesman’s garment, and by some trick of the light it seemed to shine, as though the fabric were woven of mirrored threads.

      Shadwell caught the look on Cal’s face. His voice was feather-light as he said:

      ‘Do you see anything you like?’

      Cal didn’t trust the man. Was it the smile or the calf-skin gloves that made him suspicious? Whichever, he wanted as little time in the man’s company as possible.

      But there was something in the jacket. Something that caught the light, and made Cal’s heart beat a little faster.

      ‘Please …’ Shadwell coaxed. ‘Have a look.’

      His hand went to the jacket again, and opened it.

      ‘Tell me …’ he purred, ‘… if there’s anything there that takes your fancy.’

      This time, he fully opened the jacket, exposing the lining. And yes. Cal’s first judgment had been correct. It did shine.

      ‘I am, as I said, a salesman,’ Shadwell was explaining. ‘I make it a Golden Rule always to carry some samples of my merchandise around with me.’

      Merchandise. Cal shaped the word in his head, his eyes still fixed on the interior of the jacket. What a word that was: merchandise. And there, in the lining of the jacket, he could almost see that word made solid. Jewellery, was it, that gleamed there? Artificial gems with a sheen that blinded the way only the fake could. He squinted into the glamour, looking to make sense out of what he saw, while the Salesman’s voice went about its persuasions:

      ‘Tell me what you’d like and it’s yours. I can’t say fairer than that, can I? A fine young man like you should be able to pick and choose. The world’s your oyster. I can see that. Open in front of you. Have what you like. Free, gratis and without charge. You tell me what you see in there, and the next minute it’s in your hands …’

      Look away, something in Cal said; nothing comes free. Prices must be paid.

      But his gaze was so infatuated with the mysteries in the folds of the jacket that he couldn’t have averted his eyes now if his life depended upon it.

      ‘… tell me …’ the Salesman said, ‘… what you see …’

      Ah, there was a question –

      ‘… and it’s yours.’

      He saw forgotten treasures, things he’d once upon a time set his heart upon, thinking that if he owned them he’d never want for anything again. Worthless trinkets, most of them; but items that awoke old longings. A pair of X-ray spectacles he’d seen advertised at the back of a comic book (see thru walls! impress your friends!) but had never been able to buy. There they were now, their plastic lens gleaming, and seeing them he remembered the October nights he’d lain awake wondering how they worked.

      And what was that beside them? Another childhood fetish. A photograph of a woman dressed only in stiletto heels and a sequinned G-string, presenting her over-sized breasts to the viewer. The boy two doors down from Cal had owned that picture, stolen it from his uncle’s wallet, he’d claimed, and Cal had wanted it so badly he thought he’d die of longing. Now it hung, a dog-eared memento, in the glittering flux of Shadwell’s jacket, there for the asking.

      But no sooner had it made itself apparent than it too faded, and new prizes appeared in its place to tempt him.

      ‘What is it you see, my friend?’

      The keys to a car he’d longed to own. A prize pigeon, the winner of innumerable races, that he’d been so envious of he’d have happily abducted –

      ‘… just tell me what you see. Ask, and it’s yours …’

      There was so much. Items that had seemed – for an hour, a day – the pivot upon which his world turned, all hung now in the miraculous store-room of the Salesman’s coat.

      But they were fugitive, all of them. They appeared only to evaporate again. There was something else there, which prevented these trivialities from holding his attention for more than moments. What it was, he couldn’t yet see.

      He was dimly aware that Shadwell was addressing him again, and that the tone of the Salesman’s voice had altered. There was some puzzlement in it now, tinged with exasperation.

      ‘Speak up, my friend … why don’t you tell me what you want?’

      ‘I can’t … quite