Clive Barker
 The Books of blood
    
    
    
    
    
    
    CONTENTS
    
    THE BOOK OF BLOOD
    
    THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN
    
    THE YATTERING AND JACK
    
    PIG BLOOD AND STARSHINE
    
    IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES
    
    
    
    THE BOOK OF BLOOD
    
    
    THE DEAD HAVE highways.
    They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland 
behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can 
be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, 
violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart 
is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.
    They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes 
and intersections.
    It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this 
forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at 
the cross-roads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers 
that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable 
feet.
    Such an intersection on the highway of the dead was located at Number 65, Tollington 
Place. Just a brick-fronted, mock-Georgian detached house, Number 65 was unremarkable in 
every other way. An old, forgettable house, stripped of the cheap grandeur it had once 
laid claim to, it had stood empty for a decade or more.
    It was not rising damp that drove tenants from Number 65. It was not the rot in the 
cellars, or the subsidence that had opened a crack in the front of the house that ran 
from doorstep to eaves, it was the noise of passage. In the upper storey the din of that 
traffic never ceased. It cracked the plaster on the walls and it warped the beams. It 
rattled the windows. It rattled the mind too. Number 65, Tollington Place was a haunted 
house, and no-one could possess it for long without insanity setting in.
    At some time in its history a horror had been committed in that house. No-one knew 
when, or what. But even to the untrained observer the oppressive atmosphere of the house, 
particularly the top storey, was unmistakable. There was a memory and a promise of blood 
in the air of Number 65, a scent that lingered in the sinuses, and turned the strongest 
stomach. The building and its environs were shunned by vermin, by birds, even by flies. 
No woodlice crawled in its kitchen, no starling had nested in its attic. Whatever 
violence had been done there, it had opened the house up, as surely as a knife slits a 
fish's belly; and through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead peered out, and had 
their say.
    That was the rumour anyway.
    
    It was the third week of the investigation at 65, Tollington Place. Three weeks of 
unprecedented success in the realm of the paranormal. Using a newcomer to the business, a 
twenty-year-old called Simon McNeal, as a medium, the Essex University Parapsychology 
Unit had recorded all but incontrovertible evidence of life after death.
    In the top room of the house, a claustrophobic corridor of a room, the McNeal boy had 
apparently summoned the dead, and at his request they had left copious evidence of their 
visits, writing in a hundred different hands on the pale ochre walls. They wrote, it 
seemed, whatever came into their heads. Their names, of course, and their birth and death 
dates. Fragments of memories, and well-wishes to their living descendants, strange 
elliptical phrases that hinted at their present torments and mourned their lost joys. 
Some of the hands were square and ugly, some delicate and feminine. There were obscene 
drawings and half-finished jokes alongside lines of romantic poetry. A badly drawn rose. 
A game of noughts and crosses. A shopping list.
    The famous had come to this wailing wall-Mussolini was there, Lennon and Janis 
Joplin-and nobodies too, forgotten people, had signed themselves beside the greats. It 
was a roll-call of the dead, and it was growing day by day, as though word of mouth was 
spreading amongst the lost tribes, and seducing them out of silence to sign this barren 
room with their sacred presence.
    
    After a lifetime's work in the field of psychic research, Doctor Florescu was well 
accustomed to the hard facts of failure. It had been almost comfortable, settling back 
into a certainty that the evidence would never manifest itself. Now, faced with a sudden 
and spectacular success, she felt both elated and confused.
    She sat, as she had sat for three incredible weeks, in the main room on the middle 
floor, one flight of stairs down from the writing room, and listened to the clamour of 
noises from upstairs with a sort of awe, scarcely daring to believe that she was allowed 
to be present at this miracle. There had been nibbles before, tantalizing hints of voices 
from another world, but this was the first time that province had insisted on being heard.
    Upstairs, the noises stopped.
    Mary looked at her watch: it was six-seventeen p.m.
    For some reason best known to the visitors, the contact never lasted much after six. 
She'd wait "til half-past then go up. What would it have been today? Who would have come 
to that sordid little room, and left their mark?
    "Shall I set up the cameras?" Reg Fuller, her assistant, asked.
    "Please," she murmured, distracted by expectation.
    "Wonder what we'll get today?"
    "We'll leave him ten minutes."
    "Sure." Upstairs, McNeal slumped in the corner of the room, and watched the October 
sun through the tiny window. He felt a little shut in, all alone in that damn place, but 
he still smiled to himself, that warm, beatific smile that melted even the most academic 
heart. Especially Doctor Florescu's: oh yes, the woman was infatuated with his smile, his