In the Flesh by Clive Barker Page A

while yet.

     

     

      'If you'll excuse me,' she said.

     

      The buzzing had quietened a little, and in the hush the man in the doorway spoke. His unaccented voice was almost as sweet as his scent.

     

     

      'No need to leave yet,' he breathed.

     

     

      'I'm due... due...'

     

     

      Though she couldn't see his eyes, she felt them on her, and they made her feel drowsy, like that summer

     

    that sang in her head.

     

     

      'I came for you,' he said.

     

      She repeated the four words in her head. I came for you. If they were meant as a threat, they certainly weren't spoken as one.

     

     

      'I don't... know you,' she said.

     

     

      'No,' the man murmured. 'But you doubted me.'

     

     

      'Doubted?'

     

     

      'You weren't content with the stories, with what they wrote on the walls. So I was obliged to come.'

     

      The drowsiness slowed her mind to a crawl, but she grasped the essentials of what the man was saying. That he was legend, and she, in disbelieving him, had obliged him to show his hand. She looked, now, down at those hands. One of them was missing. In its place, a hook.

     

      'There will be some blame,' he told her. 'They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say - what's blood for, if not for shedding? And in time the scrutiny will pass. The police will leave, the cameras will be pointed at some fresh horror, and they will be left alone, to tell stories of the Candyman again.'

     

     

      'Candyman?' she said. Her tongue could barely shape that blameless word.

     

      'I came for you,' he murmured so softly that seduction might have been in the air. And so saying, he moved through the passageway and into the light.

     

      She knew him, without doubt. She had known him all along, in that place kept for terrors. It was the man on the wall. His portrait painter had not been a fantasist: the picture that howled over her was matched in each extraordinary particular by the man she now set eyes upon. He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his bloodstained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks. But people were facile. They needed these shows and shams to keep their interest. Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones roiled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history

    of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

     

      And she was almost enchanted. By his voice, by his colours, by the buzz from his body. She fought to resist the rapture, though. There was a monster here, beneath this fetching display; its nest of razors was at her feet, still drenched in blood. Would it hesitate to slit her own throat if it once laid hands on her?

     

      As the Candyman reached for her she dropped down and snatched the blanket up, flinging it at him. A rain of razors and sweetmeats fell around his shoulders. The blanket followed, blinding him. But before she could snatch the moment to slip past him, the pillow which had lain on the blanket rolled in front of her.

     

      It was not a pillow at all. Whatever the forlorn white casket she had seen in the hearse had contained, it was not the body of Baby Kerry. That was here, at her feet, its blood-drained face turned up to her. He was naked. His body showed everywhere signs of the fiend's attentions.

     

      In the two heartbeats she took to register this last horror, the Candyman threw off the blanket. In his struggle to escape from its folds, his jacket had come unbuttoned, and she saw - though her senses protested - that the contents of his torso had rotted away, and the hollow was now occupied by a nest of bees. They swarmed in the vault of his chest, and