Free Weaveworld by Clive Barker

direction of those who now appraised him.
    ‘He knows,’ the woman said. Her voice held not a trace of warmth. Even, perhaps, of humanity.
    ‘You were right then,’ said Shadwell. ‘It’s been here.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Good enough,’ said Shadwell, and summarily closed the jacket.
    The effect on Cal was cataclysmic. With the world – the Fugue , she’d called it – so abruptly snatched away he felt weak as a babe. It was all he could do to stand upright. Queasily, his eyes slid in the direction of the woman.
    She was beautiful: that was his first thought. She was dressed in reds and purples so dark they were almost black, the fabric wrapped tightly around her upper body so as to seem both chaste, her ripeness bound and sealed, and, in the act of sealing, eroticized. The same paradox informed her features. Her hair-line had been shaved back fully two inches, and her eye-brows totally removed, which left her face eerily innocent of expression. Yet her flesh gleamed as if oiled, and though the shaving, and the absence of any scrap of make-up to flatter her features, seemed acts in defiance of her beauty, her face could not be denied its sensuality. Her mouth was too sculpted: and her eyes – umber one moment, gold the next – too eloquent for the feelings there to be disguised. What feelings, Cal could only vaguely read. Impatience certainly, as though being here sickened her, and stirred some fury Cal had no desire to see unleashed. Contempt – for him most likely – and yet a great focus upon him, as though she saw through to his marrow, and was preparing to congeal it with a thought.
    There were no such contradictions in her voice however. It was steel and steel.
    ‘How long?’ she demanded of him. ‘How long since you saw the Fugue?’
    He couldn’t meet her eyes for more than a moment. His gaze fled to the mantelpiece, and the tripod’s shoes.
    ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
    ‘You’ve seen it. You saw it again in the jacket. It’s fruitless to deny it.’
    ‘It’s better you answer,’ Shadwell advised.
    Cal looked from mantelpiece to door. They had left it open. ‘You can both go to Hell,’ he said quietly.
    Did Shadwell laugh? Cal wasn’t certain.
    ‘We want the carpet,’ said the woman.
    ‘It belongs to us, you understand,’ Shadwell said. ‘We have a legitimate claim to it.’
    ‘So, if you’d be so kind …’ the woman’s lip curled at this courtesy. ‘… tell me where the carpet’s gone, and we can have the matter done with.’
    ‘Such easy terms.’ the Salesman said. ‘Tell us, and we’re gone.’
    Claiming ignorance would be no defence, Cal thought; they knew that he knew, and they wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. He was trapped. Yet dangerous as things had become, he felt inwardly elated. His tormentors had confirmed the existence of the world he’d glimpsed: the Fugue. The urge to be out of their presence as fast as possible was tempered by the desire to play them along, and hope they’d tell him more about the vision he’d witnessed.
    ‘Maybe I did see it,’ he said.
    ‘No maybe,’ the woman replied.
    ‘It’s hazy …’ he said. ‘I remember something , but I’m not quite sure what.’
    ‘You don’t know what the Fugue is?’ said Shadwell.
    ‘Why should he?’ the woman replied. ‘He came on it by luck.’
    ‘But he saw,’ said Shadwell.
    ‘A lot of Cuckoos have some sight, it doesn’t mean they understand. He’s lost, like all of them.’
    Cal resented her condescension, but in essence she was right. Lost he was.
    ‘What you saw isn’t your business,’ she said to him. ‘Just tell us where you put the carpet, then forget you ever laid eyes on it.’
    ‘I don’t have the carpet,’ he said.
    The woman’s entire face seemed to darken, the pupils of her eyes like moons barely eclipsing some apocalyptic light.
    From the landing, Cal heard again the scuttling sounds he’d previously taken to be rats. Now he