Book Six, Chapter Five
“The Book of Blood (A Postscript): On Jerusalem Street”
“Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?” he asked McNeal, as the boy returned with the glass. “Like you weren’t here…?”
“The boy?” McNeal said. “He isn’t here. He hasn’t been here in a long time.”
He sat down; drank. Wyburd began to feel more than a little uneasy. Was the boy simply mad, or playing some damn-fool game?
The boy swallowed another mouthful of vodka, then asked, matter of factly: “What’s it worth to you?”
Wyburd frowned. “What’s what worth?”
“His skin,” the boy prompted. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” Wyburd emptied his glass with two swallows, making no reply. McNeal shrugged. “Everyone has the right to silence,” he said. “Except for the boy of course. No silence for him.” He looked down at his hand, turning it over to appraise the writing on his palm. “The stories go on, night and day. Never stop. They tell themselves, you see. They bleed and bleed. You can never hush them; never heal them.”
A postscript indeed, “On Jerusalem Street” does not appear in the American edition of Books of Blood Volume Six, titled Cabal here in the States; nor does it appear in the collected edition of Volumes One through Three that’s available. Before I read it in my Complete Books of Blood last night, I’d never seen it before. So my Halloween treat comes two nights early, I suppose.
The story’s all of four pages long, and reintroduces us to McNeal, the ill-fated fraudulent medium from the story that kicked off the collection. As this story ends that collection, held as it is by the fiction itself to be readable in its entirety on McNeal’s flesh, you can guess how the story ends for McNeal. How it ends for the man by whom McNeal is ended did come as something of a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn’t have. It’s one final act of catharsis for Barker, who by this point had spent (I’m guessing) around four years at least pouring forth these ghastly stories. It shouldn’t come as a shock that he’d want somebody else to know how it felt to be drowned in these books of blood, making literal what had been only metaphorical for him, and for the reader too of course.
Is there any grand concluding statement to be found in the final story? I think so, actually:
It was a great relief to tell the story. Not because he wanted to be remembered, but because the telling relieved him of the tale. It no longer belonged to him, that life, that death. He had better business, as did they all. Roads to travel; splendours to drink down. He felt the landscape widen. Felt the air brightening.
Surely Barker’s talking about himself here, as storytellers are wont to do. But he’s also talking about nearly all his characters, nearly all their lives and deaths. Haven’t they spent each of their stories casting off their belongings–the obligations of responsibility, of morality, of sanity, of gender, of humanity, of body, of mind, finally of life itself? Freed of those possessions, doesn’t the landscape widen for them, even if they have to die to see it?
What the boy had said was true. The dead have highways.
Only the living are lost.
The pleasure of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood is that, lost though we may be, we are given by them a glimpse of a possible destination, and the encouragement, no matter how frightened we may become, to wander on our way.