Weaveworld by Clive Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

since she’s been here. I don’t think she was going to let go until you’d come.’
    ‘I see,’ said Suzanna.
    ‘You must be very important to her,’ he replied. ‘It’s good you’ve seen her. So many of the old folks, you know, die in here and nobody ever seems to care. Where are you staying?’
    ‘I hadn’t thought. A hotel. I suppose.’
    ‘Perhaps you’d give us a number to contact you at, should the necessity arise.’
    ‘Of course.’
    So saying, he nodded and left her to the runners. They were no less blind for the conversation.
    Mimi Laschenski did not love her, as the Doctor had claimed; how could she? She knew nothing of the way her grandchild had grown up; they were like closed books to each other. And yet something in what Chai had said rang true. Perhaps she had been waiting, fighting the good fight until her daughter’s daughter came to her bedside.
    And why? To hold her hand and expend her last ounce of energy giving Suzanna a fragment of some tapestry? It was a pretty gift, but it signified either too much or too little. Whichever, Suzanna did not comprehend it.
    She went back to Room Five. The nurse was in attendance, the old lady still as stone on her pillow. Eyes closed, hands laid by her side. Suzanna stared down at the face, slack once more. It could tell her nothing.
    She took hold of Mimi’s hand and held it for a few moments, tight, then went on her way. She would go back to Rue Street, she decided, and see if being in the house jogged a memory or two.
    She’d spent so much time forgetting her childhood, putting it where it couldn’t call the bluff of hard-won maturity. And now, with the boxes sealed, what did she find? A mystery that defied her adult self, and coaxed her back into the past in search of a solution.
    She remembered the face in the tall-boy mirror, that had sent her sobbing down the stairs.
    Was it waiting still? And was it still her own?

VI

    MAD MOONEY
    1
    al was frightened as he had never been frightened in his life before. He sat in his room, the door locked, and shook.
    The shaking had begun a few minutes after events at Rue Street, almost twenty-four hours ago now, and it hadn’t shown much sign of stopping since. Sometimes it made his hands tremble so much he could hardly hold the glass of whisky he’d nursed through an all but sleepless night, other times it made his teeth chatter. But most of the shaking didn’t go on outside, it was in. It was as if the pigeons had got into his belly somehow, and were flapping their wings against his innards.
    And all because he’d seen something wonderful, and he knew in his bones that his life would never be the same again. How could it? He’d climbed the sky and looked down on the secret place that he’d been waiting since childhood to find.
    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 homageon 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.
    That was