Cabal by Clive Barker Page B

without rancour.
    ‘So where is he?’
Lori demanded.
    Rachel turned away, and the shadows took her completely from view.
    ‘Tell me! Please God!’
Lori yelled down after her. Suddenly she was crying: in a turmoil of rage and fear and frustration.
‘Tell me, please!’
    Desperation carried her down the stairs after Rachel, her shouts becoming appeals.
    ‘Wait … talk to me …’
    She took three steps, then a fourth. On the fifth she stopped, or rather her body stopped, the muscles of her legs becoming rigid without her instruction, refusing to carry her another step into the darkness of the crypt. Her skin was suddenly crawling with gooseflesh; her pulse thumping in her ears. No force of will could overrule the animal imperative forbidding her to descend; all she could do was stand rooted to the spot, and stare into the depths. Even her tears had suddenly dried, and the spit gone from her mouth, so she could no more speak than walk. Not that she wanted to call down into the darkness now, for fear the forces there answered her summons. Though she could see nothing of them her gut knew they were more terrible by far than Rachel and her beast-child. Shape-shifting was almost a natural act beside the skills these others had to hand. She felt their perversity as a quality of the air. She breathed it in and out. It scoured her lungs and hurried her heart.
    If they had Boone’s corpse as a plaything it was beyond reclamation. She would have to take comfort from the hope that his spirit was somewhere brighter.
    Defeated, she took a step backwards. The shadows seemed unwilling to relinquish her, however. She felt them weave themselves into her blouse and hook themselves on her eyelashes, a thousand tiny holds upon her, slowing her retreat.
    ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she murmured. ‘Please let me go.’
    But the shadows held on, their power a promise of retribution if she defied them.
    ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘What more can I do?’
    And suddenly, they capitulated. She hadn’t realized how strong their claim was until it was withdrawn. She stumbled backwards, falling up the stairs into the light of the antechamber. Turning her back on the crypt she fled for the door, and out into the sun.
    It was too bright. She covered her eyes, holding herself upright by gripping the stone portico, so that she could accustom herself to its violence. It took several minutes, standing against the mausoleum, shaking and rigid by turn. Only when she felt able to see through half-closed eyes did she attempt to walk, her route back to the main gate a farrago of cul-de-sacs and missed turnings.
    By the time she reached it, however, she’d more or less accustomed herself to the brutality of light and sky. Her body was still not back at her mind’s disposal however. Her legs refused to carry her more than a few paces up the hill to Midian without threatening to drop her to the ground. Her system, overdosed on adrenalin, was cavorting. But at least she was alive. For a short while there on the stairs it had been touch and go. The shadows that had held her by lash and thread could have taken her, she had no doubt of that. Claimed her for the Underworld and snuffed her out. Why had they released her? Perhaps because she’d saved the child; perhaps because she’d sworn silence and they’d trusted her. Neither, however, seemed the motives of monsters; and she had to believe that what lived beneath Midian’s cemetery deserved that name. Who other than monsters made their nests amongst the dead? They might call themselves the Nightbreed, but neither words nor gestures of good faith could disguise their true nature.
    She had escaped demons – things of rot and wickedness – and she would have offered up a prayer of thanks for her deliverance if the sky had not been so wide and bright, and so plainly devoid of deities to hear.

PART THREE

DARK AGES
    ‘… out on the town, with two skins. The leather and the flesh. Three if you count the