Free Cabal by Clive Barker Page B

started to cross towards the mausoleum, using the shadows like stepping stones. She didn’t look up at the door – her attention was wholly focused on keeping the animal from the light – but she could feel the mourner’s presence, willing her on. Once the woman gave voice; not with a word but with a soft sound, a cradle-side sound, addressed not to Lori but to the dying animal.
    With the mausoleum door three or four yards from her, Lori dared to look up. The woman in the door could be patient no longer. She reached out from her refuge, her arms bared as the garment she wore rode back, her flesh exposed to the sunlight. The skin was white – as ice, as paper – but only for an instant. As the fingers stretched to relieve Lori of her burden they darkened and swelled as though instantly bruised. The mourner made a cry of pain, and almost fell back into the tomb as she withdrew her arms, but not before the skin broke and trails of dust – yellowish, like pollen – burst from her fingers and fell through the sunlight on to the patio.
    Seconds later, Lori was at the door; then through it into the safety of the darkness beyond. The room was no more than an antechamber. Two doors led out of it: one into a chapel of some sort, the other below ground. The woman in mourning was standing at this second door, which was open, as far from the wounding light as she could get. In her haste, her veil had fallen. The face beneath was fine-boned, and thin almost to the point of being wasted, which lent additional force to her eyes, which caught, even in the darkest corner of the room, some trace of light from through the open door, so that they seemed almost to glow.
    Lori felt no trace of fear. It was the other woman who trembled as she nursed her sunstruck hands, her gaze moving from Lori’s bewildered face to the animal.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s dead,’ Lori said, not knowing what disease afflicted this woman, but recognizing her grief from all too recent memory.
    ‘No,’ the woman said with quiet conviction. ‘She can’t die.’
    Her words were statement not entreaty, but the stillness in Lori’s arms contradicted such certainty. If the creature wasn’t yet dead it was surely beyond recall.
    ‘Will you bring her to me?’ the woman asked.
    Lori hesitated. Though the weight of the body was making her arms ache, and she wanted the duty done, she didn’t want to cross the chamber.
    ‘Please,’ the woman said, reaching out with wounded hands.
    Relenting, Lori left the comfort of the door and the sunlit patio beyond. She’d taken two or three steps, however, when she heard the sound of whispering. There could only be one source: the stairs. There were people in the crypt. She stopped walking, childhood superstitions rising up in her. Fear of tombs; fear of stairs
descending;
fear of the Underworld.
    ‘It’s nobody,’ the woman said, her face pained. ‘Please, bring me Babette.’
    As if to further reassure Lori she took a step away from the stairs, murmuring to the animal she’d called Babette. Either the words, or the woman’s proximity, or perhaps the cool darkness of the chamber, won a response from the creature: a tremor that ran down its spine like an electric charge, so strong Lori almost lost hold of it. The woman’s murmurs grew louder, as if she were chiding the dying thing, her anxiety to claim it suddenly urgent. But there was an impasse. Lori was no more willing to approach the entrance to the crypt than the woman to come another step towards the outer door, and in the seconds of stasis the animal found new life. One of its claws seized Lori’s breast as it began to writhe in her embrace.
    The chiding became a shout –
    ‘Babette!’
    – but if the creature heard, it didn’t care to listen. Its motion became more violent: a mingling of fit and sensuality. One moment it shuddered as though tortured; the next it moved like a snake sloughing off its skin.
    ‘Don’t look, don’t look!’
she heard the