How often had Cal heard his mother complain that Brendan spent more time with his precious pigeons than he did inside the house?

This despite, or perhaps because, the birds had been his abiding passion during her life. But Brendan Mooney had shown little or no interest in his racing birds since Eileen's death. It could only be a matter of time before the planks rotted completely, giving the rats who lived and grew gross along the railway line access to the pigeons. He approaches the door of the pigeon loft, opens it, and at that moment - for want of a better - this story takes wing.Ĭal had told his father several times that the wood at the bottom of the loft door was deteriorating. It's a job he takes no pleasure in, but escape from the city he's lived in all his life seems more unlikely than ever since the death of his mother, all of which may account for the weary expression on his well-made face. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city center. His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he's universally known as Cal.

This house, identical to the hundreds of others in this street alone, built with its back so close to the railway track that the passage of the slow train from Liverpool to Crew rocks the china dogs on the dining room sill.Īnd with this young man, who now steps out of the back door and makes his way down the beleaguered path to a ramshackle hut from which there rises a welcoming chorus of coos and flutterings. This garden, untended since the death of its protector three months ago, and now running riot beneath a blindingly bright late August sky its fruits hanging unharvested, its herbaceous borders coaxed to mutiny by a summer of torrential rain and sudden, sweltering days. Somewhere between a past half forgotten and a future as yet only glimpsed. It must be arbitrary, then, the place at which we choose to embark.

In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden among them is a filigree that will with time become a world. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

There is no first moment no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker