Galilee

Galilee Read Online Free PDF

Book: Galilee Read Online Free PDF
Author: Clive Barker
shrieking like tortured animals—as
though their forgetfulness had been snatched away, and what they were remembering was unbearable. I know there are some psychoanalysts who theorize that every creature which appears in a dream or waking dream is an aspect of the dreamer. If so, then I suppose the naked beasts in the streets of Charleston are the part of me that’s my father, and the other, the terrified souls sobbing incoherently, are that human part which my mother made. But I suspect the scheme’s too simple. In search of a pattern, the theorist ignores all that’s ragged and contradictory, and ends with a pretty lie. I’m not two in one; I’m many. This self has my mother’s compassion and my father’s taste for raw mutton. That one has my mother’s love of murder stories and my father’s passion for sunflowers. Who knows how many there are? Too many for any dogma to contain, I’m certain of that.
    The point is, these dreams had me in a terrible state. I was close to tears, which is rare for me.
    And then, in the darkness, I heard the sound of shuffling, and of clicking on the wooden floor and, looking down toward the noise, saw in a lozenge of moonlight a prickly silhouette waddling toward my bed. It was a porcupine. I didn’t move. I simply let the creature come to me (my arm was hanging off the bed, my hand close to the floor) and put its wet nose in my palm.
    â€œDid you come down here on your own?” I said softly to the creature. Sometimes they did just that, particularly the younger, more adventurous ones; came shuffling down the stairs in the hope of finding a snack. But I’d no sooner asked the question than I had my answer, as my body responded to the entrance of the quill-pig’s mistress, Cesaria. You see, this pitiful anatomy of mine, wounded beyond all hope of repair, was quickening. It was uncanny. I was in the presence of this woman, my father’s wife, very rarely, but I knew from past experience the effect of this visit would last for days. Even if she were to leave the room now I would feel spasms in my lower limbs for a week or more, though the muscles of my legs were atrophied. And my cock, which had been just a piss-pipe for far too long, would stand up like an adolescent’s and demand milking twice an hour. Lord, I thought, was it any wonder she’d been worshiped? She could probably raise the dead if it pleased her to
do so.
    â€œCome away, Tansy,” she said to the porcupine.
    Tansy ignored the instruction, which I will admit pleased me. Even she might be disobeyed.
    â€œI don’t mind it,” I said.
    â€œJust be careful. The spines—”
    â€œI know.” I still had the scars where one of her quill-pigs, as she preferred to call them, had taken against me. And I think it had distressed Cesaria to see me bleed. I remember the look on her face quite clearly: her eyes like liquid night in that obsidian head of hers; her sympathy terrifying to me, because I suppose I feared her touch, her healing. Feared it would transform me, make me her devotee forever. So we’d stood, neither one of us moving, both distressed by something essential to the other (her power, my blood) while the quill-pig had sat on the floor between us and scratched its fleas.
    â€œThis book . . .” she said.
    â€œMarietta told you about it?” I said.
    â€œI don’t need telling, Maddox.”
    â€œNo. Of course not.”
    What she said next astonished me. But then of course she would never be who she is—she could not trail the legends she trails—if she were not a constant astonishment.
    â€œYou must write it fearlessly,” she said. “Write out of your head and out of your heart and never care about the consequences.”
    She spoke more softly than I’d ever heard her speak before. Not weakly, you understand, but with a kind of tenderness I’d always assumed she would never feel
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