Free Books of Blood by Clive Barker Page A

was there, his bones  sucked clean  and drilled with stops, his bladder and lungs teased through  slashes in his body  as reservoirs for the piper's breath. He was draped, inverted, across the musician's lap, and even now was  played upon - the sacs ballooning, the tongueless head giving out a wheezing note. Dorothea was slumped beside him, no less transformed, the strings of her gut made taut between her splinted legs like an obscene lyre; her breasts drummed upon. There were other instruments too, men who had come off the street and fallen prey to the band. Even Chaplin was there,
    much of his flesh burned away, his rib-cage played upon indifferently well.
    'I didn't take you for a music lover,' Butterfield said,
    drawing upon a cigarette, and smiling in welcome. 'Put down your axe and join us.'
    The word axe reminded Harry of the weight in his hands, though he couldn't find his way through the bars of music to remember what it signified.
                       65'Don't be afraid,' Butterfield said, 'you're an innocent in this. We hold no grudge against you.'
    'Dorothea . . .' he said.
    'She was an innocent too,' said the lawyer, 'until we showed her some sights.'
    Harry looked at the woman's body; at the terrible changes that they had wrought upon her. Seeing them,
    a tremor began in him, and something came between him and  the music; the imminence of tears blotted it out.
    'Put down the axe,' Butterfield told him.
    But the sound of the concert could not compete with the grief that was mounting in him. Butterfield seemed to see the change in his eyes; the disgust and anger growing there. He dropped  his half-smoked cigarette and signalled for the music-making to stop.
    'Must  it be death, then?' Butterfield said, but the enquiry was scarcely voiced before Harry started down the last few stairs towards him. He raised the axe and swung it at the lawyer but the blow was misplaced. The blade ploughed the plaster of the wall, missing its target by a foot.
    At this eruption of violence the musicians threw down their instruments and began across the lobby, trailing their coats and tails in blood and grease. Harry caught their advance from the corner of his eye. Behind the horde, still rooted in the shadows, was another form,
    larger than the largest of the mustered demons, from which there now came a thump that might have been that of a vast jack-hammer. He tried to make sense of sound or sight, but could do neither. There was no time for curiosity; the demons were almost upon him.
    Butterfield glanced round to encourage their advance,
    and Harry - catching the moment - swung the axe asecond time. The blow caught Butterfield's shoulder;
    the arm was instantly severed. The lawyer shrieked;
    blood sprayed the wall. There was no time for a third blow, however. The demons were reaching for him,
    smiles lethal.
    He turned on the stairs, and began up them, taking the steps two, three and four at a time. Butterfield was still shrieking below; from the flight above he heard Valentin calling his name. He had neither time nor breath to answer.
    They were on his heels, their ascent a din of grunts and shouts and beating wings. And behind it all, the jack-
    hammer thumped  its way to the bottom of the flight,
    its noise more intimidating by far than the chatterings of the berserkers at his back. It was in his belly, that thump; in his bowels. Like death's heartbeat, steady and irrevocable.
    On the second landing he heard a whirring sound behind him, and half turned to see a human-headed moth  the size of a vulture climbing the air towards him. He  met it with the axe blade, and hacked it down. There was a cry of excitement from below as the body flapped down the stairs, its wings working like paddles. Harry sped up the remaining flight to where Valentin was  standing, listening. It wasn't the chatter he was attending to, nor the cries of the lawyer;
    it was the jack-hammer.
    'They brought the Raparee,' he said.
    'I